Question

Which author wrote the essay "Civil Disobedience," which influenced Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.?

A.
Louisa May Alcott

B.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

C.
Henry David Thoreau

D.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Answer 1

C. Henry David Thoreau. Have you ever read it? It's very interesting.

Here's a piece of it: “Man and his affairs, church and state—and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture—even politics, the most alarming of them all—I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape.Politics is but a narrow field, and that still narrower highway yonder leads to it. I sometimes direct the traveler thither. If you would go to the political world, follow the great road—follow that market man, keep his dust in your eyes, and it will lead you straight to it—for it too has its place merely, and does not occupy all space. I pass from it as from a bean field into the forest, and it is forgotten. In one half hour I can walk off to some portion of the earth’s surface where a man does not stand from one year’s end to another and there consequently politics are not, for they are but as the cigar smoke of a man.”