Henry David Thoreau, American naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher, was born on July 12, 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts. One of the great protagonists of the "American Renaissance", is considered one of the greatest American philosophers of all time. His essay Resistance to Civil Government, also known as Civil Disobedience, first published in 1849, was destined to become one of the most important manifestos against injustice and in favor of humanity's freedom of thought and action. An essay today more than ever decidedly relevant, in an era in which the most fundamental freedoms and the rights of humanity have been questioned and limited by those power elites who hide behind governments and pursue the plans of a New World Order founded on slavery, control and submission. For Thoreau, conscience comes above law: we should be men first, and subjects afterward: «The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right».