Henry David Thoreau

The Concord writer who spent a night in jail for refusing a tax and turned it into the most influential American essay on conscience. Civil Disobedience argues that a person's first duty is to do right, and that an unjust law has no claim on a just man. Walden is the longer argument: that a life lived deliberately, apart from the rush, is itself a civic act. King carried him. Gandhi carried him. The jail cell outlasted the empire.