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On the Duty of Civil Disobedience
by Henry David Thoreau
Category: Fiction
Status: Available
Source: Public Domain — Project Gutenberg
About This Book
"On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" by Henry David Thoreau is an essay first published in 1849. Thoreau argues that individuals must follow their conscience over unjust laws, challenging the idea that citizens should passively obey government authority. Motivated by his opposition to slavery and the Mexican-American War, he contends that governments often enable injustice rather than prevent it. The essay became a foundational text for nonviolent resistance, profoundly influencing activists like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. in their struggles for justice and social change. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
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About This Edition
This edition of On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau is catalogued on Libreya under Fiction and runs approximately 9,362 words — about 47 minutes of reading at an average pace. It is sourced from Project Gutenberg, the world's oldest digital library of public domain literature, founded in 1971 by Michael Hart, and every text on Libreya has been verified to be free of copyright restrictions in the United States. You can view the original Project Gutenberg edition here.
On Libreya, the text has been carefully formatted for comfortable reading on any screen — with consistent chapter navigation, adjustable font sizes, and four reading themes: light, sepia, dark, and night mode. Your reading position is saved automatically when you sign in, so you can pick up exactly where you left off across any device. The original text has not been altered in any way; what you read here is the same work as it appeared in its original published form.
About Classic Fiction
Classic fiction represents the highest achievements of literary imagination. The novels in this genre have shaped how generations of readers understand human nature, society, and the fundamental questions of existence. Reading 19th and early 20th-century novels offers far more than historical interest: these stories explore love, ambition, morality, and identity with an insight that remains startlingly relevant today. Authors like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Austen, Hardy, and Dickens wrote for readers much like us — people trying to make sense of a complicated world — and their observations on class, relationships, power, and conscience carry across centuries with barely diminished force. Classic fiction is also where the novel as an art form reached some of its greatest heights: innovative narrative structures, deeply realized characters, and prose styles that reward slow, attentive reading. These are not museum pieces. They are living works that continue to be discussed, adapted, and argued over because they capture something essential and enduring about human experience.
