jjares reviewed on 2/12/2023 + 3429 more book reviews

Henry Thoreau was one of America's most famous writers and one of the best-known Transcendentalists (see below). Thoreau's writings influenced Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr, among others. Thoreau believed the best, and sometimes the only way to fight injustice was through passive disobedience. He believed that passive resistance was the friction that could stop the machinery of injustice. If people exercise active disobedience, that incites the government to react actively. But passive disobedience puts a drag on the machinery, which creates friction -- and possibly change.

Ouch! Talk about relevance today; this is a fantastic treatise on a person's relationship with the government. This short work is full of truisms that fit today's problems. Probably the most iconic quote from this book is: "That government is best which governs least."

* Transcendentalists advocated the idea of personal knowledge of God, believing that no intermediary was needed for spiritual insight. They embraced idealism, focusing on nature and opposing materialism. This was a popular movement of writers and philosophers from 1820 - 1830 years in New England.

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