•Why it earns a slot
The essay that gave nonviolent resistance its name and its argument, written from a single night in a small-town jail that Thoreau treats as almost a curiosity rather than a punishment.
In this 1849 essay, Henry David Thoreau argues that conscience outranks law, and that a just individual's duty, when a government commits injustice such as slavery or an unjust war, is to withdraw support rather than wait for majority opinion to catch up. He grounds the argument in his own refusal to pay a poll tax and the night he spent in jail for it.
This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: gutenberg.org.