Let Your Life Be A Counter

From "Resistance to Civil Government" (1849). The line is the climax of Thoreau's extended metaphor comparing government to a machine: he first acknowledges that some friction is tolerable, but argues that when the machinery of the state requires you personally to act as an instrument of injustice, non-cooperation becomes a moral duty. "Counter friction" is Thoreau's term for principled noncooperation — not violence or withdrawal from society, but making one's entire conduct an active opposing force. This phrase directly inspired Mario Savio's famous 1964 Free Speech Movement speech at Berkeley, which echoed it almost word for word.