Identify the author: Spending most of my forty-four years in…

Identify the author: Spending most of my forty-four years in Concord, I was actively concerned with social issues and with a feeling for the unity of humanity as seen in my writing. I am in the line of philosophers who have seen me as the origin of the modern concept of passive resistance as the final instrument of minority opinion to fight injustice, which found demonstration in Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. I chose to live for two years in a small hut I built, during which I wrote a major Transcendental work.

Identify the author: We at the North find it difficult to un…

Identify the author: We at the North find it difficult to understand how moderate punishment can cause death. I have read several of your law-books attentively, and I find no cases of punishment for the murder of a slave, except by fines paid to the owner, to indemnify him for the loss of his property: the same as if his horse or cow had been killed. . . . If you turn to the literature of England or France, you will find your institution treated with little favor. The fact is, the whole civilized world proclaims Slavery an outlaw, and the best intellect of the age is active in hunting it down.

Identify title: “Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to o…

Identify title: “Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that if they should resist, the remedy is worse than the evil. .  .”

Identify the author: “To go into solitude, a man must needs…

Identify the author: “To go into solitude, a man must needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and vulgar things. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are!”

Identify the author: He was a Unitarian minister for a time….

Identify the author: He was a Unitarian minister for a time. One of the main proponents of the Transcendental philosophy, he lived in Concord but did travel abroad. He wrote the first major comprehensive expression of American Transcendentalism. Recognized in his lifetime, he left the pulpit to become a writer and lecturer. He was an advocate for letting nature be a healing force in life.