Excerpts from H.D. Thoreau’s journals

This is a collection of excerpts from the journals of Henry David Thoreau concerning law, government, man in society, war, economics, duty, and conscience. It is divided into thirteen web pages:

This collection of journal excerpts is also available as a book: The Price of Freedom: Political philosophy from Thoreau’s journals.

These are based on the journals transcribed by Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen in their The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau (), the online journal transcripts at The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, and on the “lost” volume transcribed by Perry Miller in Consciousness in Concord ().

Footnotes are mine unless otherwise noted. I mostly stuck by the transcriptions used in the sources mentioned above, occasionally omitting brackets when they were used to insert some obvious missing article or end-quote, or when the intended addition seemed unnecessary. I sometimes used ellipses to omit material without distinguishing these from ellipses used by the editors of the transcribed journals or by Thoreau himself.