The Only Obligation Which I Have

From "Resistance to Civil Government" (1849). The line immediately follows Thoreau's assertion that "it is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right," and together the two sentences form his statement of radical individual conscience. Thoreau does not reject civic life, but insists that conscience precedes citizenship: a person's primary obligation is to do what is right at any given moment, not to defer that judgment to majority opinion or legal statute. The essay influenced the non-violent resistance philosophies of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr..