Any Man More Right Than His

From "Resistance to Civil Government" (1849), paragraph 20. Thoreau is addressing abolitionists who argued they should wait until they constituted a voting majority before acting against slavery. He rejects the premise entirely: moral rightness is not a matter of arithmetic. A single person standing on a just principle — in this case, the wrongness of slavery — already outweighs any numerical majority that condones injustice. The argument was cited by Mahatma Gandhi as a direct influence on Satyagraha, and by Martin Luther King Jr. during the American civil rights movement.