It Is Not Desirable To Cultivate

From "Resistance to Civil Government" (1849). Thoreau opens his argument by declaring that people must be "men first, and subjects afterward," and this sentence expresses the logical consequence: compliance with law is never a sufficient moral justification for an action, because law and justice are not the same thing. He illustrates the point vividly, describing columns of soldiers marching into unjust wars as a result of "an undue respect for the law" — men acting as machines rather than as moral agents. The essay became the cornerstone of the philosophy of nonviolent protest and influenced Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr..