essay help?

Question

"to be strictly just, it must have the sanction and consent of the governed, it can have no pure right over my person and property but what i concede to it."

I NEED AN EXAMPLE THAT DEFENDS THIS QUOTE.
ive already used slavery, and considered 1984.
thank you soooooo much in advance.

Answer 1

When I was a college student in the 70's, Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience," was the hue and cry of anti-Vietnam War activists. Other generations who have been influenced by it include the Danish Resistance Movement in the 40s, people against McCarthyism in the 50s, and anti-Apartheid activists of the 60s. Here are two additional examples.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. was also influenced by this essay. In his autobiography, he wrote:

"During my student days I read Henry David Thoreau’s essay On Civil Disobedience for the first time. Here, in this courageous New Englander's refusal to pay his taxes and his choice of jail rather than support a war that would spread slavery’s territory into Mexico, I made my first contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance. Fascinated by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system, I was so deeply moved that I reread the work several times.

"I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau. As a result of his writings and personal witness, we are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest. The teachings of Thoreau came alive in our civil rights movement; indeed, they are more alive than ever before. Whether expressed in a sit-in at lunch counters, a freedom ride into Mississippi, a peaceful protest in Albany, Georgia, a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, these are outgrowths of Thoreau’s insistence that evil must be resisted and that no moral man can patiently adjust to injustice." --King, M.L. Morehouse College (Chapter 2 of The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.)

Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948) was a Hindu religious leader and social reformer who advocated the use of noncooperation and passive resistance to achieve his goals. He believed there comes a time when the use of persuasion or appeal to authorities to volunntarily change their unjust ways. Ghandi believed that fundamental violations of human rights warranted the use of noncooperation and passive resistance. Further, he said that only individuals who have previously exhibited an inclination to obey the law have the right to disobey it. In other words people who have never learned to disobey the law for the right reason do not have the right to disobey it.

"Thoreau was a great writer, philosopher, poet, and withal a most practical man, that is, he taught nothing he was not prepared to practise in himself. He was one of the greatest and most moral men America has produced. At the time of the abolition of slavery movement, he wrote his famous essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience”. He went to gaol for the sake of his principles and suffering humanity. His essay has, therefore, been sanctified by suffering. Moreover, it is written for all time. Its incisive logic is unanswerable." --Ghandi, M.K. “For Passive Resisters” Indian Opinion 26 October 1907.