HKB
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Often appears with: taxation, tribute, and revenue · strength of conscience · rights and liberties · poll tax refusal · higher law over government · crime and punishment
Usually: narrative (1) · captivity (1) · exhortation (1) · skepticism (1)
“Thus the state never intentionally confronts a man’s sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses.” Henry David Thoreau, Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience · insight
Thoreau reports six years without paying the poll tax, his brief jail imprisonment, and his belief that the state can only coerce bodies, not higher conscience or intellectual freedom.
I should then have signed off in detail from all the societies which I never signed on to; but I did not know where to find such a complete list. I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could …