Civil Disobedience
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40 free Civil Disobedience trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
In July 1846 a Massachusetts writer refused to pay a tax, was locked up, and turned the experience into one of the most influential essays ever written. Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience argues that a citizen's first duty is to do what is right, not what the law demands, and that a just person should refuse to cooperate with an unjust government. Gandhi read it. So did Martin Luther King Jr. This quiz covers both the essay and the tradition. About half the questions follow Thoreau: why he was arrested, what he argued, the images and maxims students are asked about in class, and how the essay first reached print. The rest trace deliberate, peaceful law-breaking through history, from ancient Greek drama to the suffragettes, the Indian independence struggle, the American civil rights movement, apartheid and modern climate protest. It is written for students revising the essay for an English or history class, for teachers who want a ready-made multiple-choice review, and for anyone curious about how breaking a law in public became a way to change it. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Henry David Thoreau was jailed in 1846 for refusing to pay which tax, in protest at slavery?
Poll tax
Poll tax had gone unpaid by Thoreau for six years when the local collector, Sam Staples, stopped him and asked for it; he refused once more and was locked up.
Q 02Gandhi's 1930 march to the sea at Dandi defied a British monopoly on which everyday commodity?
Salt
Salt could legally be made and sold only by the British, so Gandhi walked 240 miles in 24 days and then broke the law by making his own at the shore.
Q 03Whose 1955 arrest for refusing to give up a bus seat sparked a year-long boycott in Alabama?
Rosa Parks
Rosa Parks was secretary of the local NAACP chapter, not simply a tired seamstress, and the boycott her arrest set off ended with bus segregation ruled unconstitutional.
Q 04Thoreau was living in a cabin he had built beside which body of water when he was arrested in 1846?
Walden Pond
Walden Pond was his home for two years, two months and two days, and he was walking into town on an errand when the tax collector stopped him.
Q 05From a jail cell in which Alabama city did Martin Luther King Jr. write his famous 1963 open letter?
Birmingham
Birmingham's jail is where King answered eight white clergymen who had argued that segregation should be fought in the courts, not the streets.
Q 06Thoreau's jailing for tax refusal, the spark for his essay Civil Disobedience, lasted how long?
One night
One night was all: someone paid the bill against his wishes, and Thoreau walked out the next day with the seed of one of history's most influential protest essays.
Q 07In which tragedy by Sophocles does a Theban princess defy King Creon's decree by burying her brother?
Antigone
Antigone puts her duty to her dead brother above the edict of Creon, her own uncle, which is why the play is read as one of the earliest portraits of principled law-breaking.
Q 08Which object, used as a shield against pepper spray, named Hong Kong's 2014 democracy protests?
Umbrella
Umbrella Revolution was a name coined on Twitter in September 2014, and it caught on within days once a British paper used it in a report on tear gas fired at the crowds.
Q 09Which conflict of the 1840s did Thoreau refuse to support with his taxes, alongside slavery?
Mexican–American War
The Mexican–American War began in 1846, the year of his arrest, and the lecture behind his essay attacked it as American imperialism.
Q 10In which city did an unidentified man stand in the path of a column of tanks in June 1989?
Beijing
Beijing's Chang'an Avenue was the spot, the day after the army crushed the Tiananmen protests, and the name and fate of the man who halted the tanks remain unknown.
Q 11Who is thought to have paid Thoreau's overdue tax in 1846, freeing him from jail against his wishes?
His aunt
His aunt is the usual suspect, but the essay never names her: Thoreau wrote only that someone interfered and paid the tax.
Q 12To what does Thoreau's Civil Disobedience liken government when it urges citizens to resist injustice?
A machine
A machine was his image for the state: a little friction is normal, he argued, but when it requires you to wrong another person, you should break the law.
Q 13In Civil Disobedience, where does Thoreau say is the true place for a just man under an unjust government?
A prison
A prison, Thoreau wrote, is the only house in a slave state where a free man can live with honour, and he urged abolitionists to risk being locked up rather than pay.
Q 21What Sanskrit-derived name, often translated as truth-force, did Gandhi give his method of nonviolent protest?
Satyagraha
Satyagraha grew out of a naming contest in Gandhi's own journal: he adapted a relative's winning entry because he had tired of the English phrase passive resistance.
Q 22In which country, where Gandhi worked as a lawyer for 21 years, did he first lead mass civil disobedience?
South Africa
South Africa is where Gandhi was thrown off a train at Pietermaritzburg for refusing to leave first class, one of the humiliations that turned him towards protest.
Q 23Which Russian novelist wrote The Kingdom of God Is Within You, a book Gandhi said overwhelmed him?
Leo Tolstoy
Q 14Thoreau opens Civil Disobedience by accepting the motto that the best state is one that does what?
Governs least
Governs least is a line often wrongly credited to Thomas Jefferson; Thoreau was borrowing the motto of a political magazine of his day.
Q 15Which inner faculty does Thoreau's Civil Disobedience say a citizen must never resign to the legislator?
Conscience
Conscience comes before the statute book, Thoreau argued: we should be men first and subjects afterward, respecting what is right rather than whatever is legal.
Q 16In Civil Disobedience, Thoreau dismisses which civic act as a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon?
Voting
Voting, he wrote, only tells others feebly that you would like the right side to win, and a wise man does not leave what is right to the mercy of chance.
Q 17Thoreau wrote in Civil Disobedience that any man more right than his neighbours already constitutes what?
A majority of one
A majority of one was his answer to those who would wait for numbers on their side: he urged abolitionists to withdraw their support from Massachusetts at once.
Q 18By his own account, Thoreau was arrested in 1846 while walking into town to collect what from a tradesman?
A mended shoe
A mended shoe was the errand, and Thoreau finished it the moment he was released: he put the shoe on and went straight off to pick berries with friends.
Q 19Which Transcendentalist essayist, Thoreau's mentor, owned the woodland where Thoreau built his cabin?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson let Thoreau build there in 1845, after other local landowners had refused him permission for a hut.
Q 20Who published Thoreau's essay in 1849, as Resistance to Civil Government, in her anthology Aesthetic Papers?
Elizabeth Peabody
Elizabeth Peabody, a bookseller who backed the Transcendentalists, printed it first; the famous title, Civil Disobedience, came in 1866, four years after Thoreau's death.
Leo Tolstoy so impressed Gandhi that in 1910 he and a friend named the idealistic community they had just founded Tolstoy Farm.
Q 24Which 15-year-old was arrested for keeping her bus seat nine months before the Montgomery bus boycott began?
Claudette Colvin
Claudette Colvin never became the face of the campaign, but she was one of four plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle, the federal case that struck down bus segregation.
Q 25In which Southern city did four Black college students begin the 1960 Woolworth's lunch-counter sit-ins?
Greensboro
Greensboro's protest began when four freshmen sat down at a 66-seat counter; within months the Woolworth's chain had dropped segregation in its Southern stores.
Q 26What name was given to the activists who took interstate buses through the segregated South in 1961?
Freedom Riders
Freedom Riders were testing Supreme Court rulings that had already outlawed segregation in interstate travel; a mob burned one of their buses outside Anniston, Alabama.
Q 27Martin Luther King Jr. began drafting his 1963 jail letter in the margins of what?
A newspaper
A newspaper smuggled into his cell carried the clergymen's statement he was answering, so King began his reply around its edges and finished it on scraps and a legal pad.
Q 28Which saint did King cite in his 1963 jail letter for the idea that an unjust law is no law at all?
St. Augustine
St. Augustine made the point in the fourth century, and King paired him with Thomas Aquinas to argue that the Jim Crow statutes were unjust and need not be obeyed.
Q 29Which suffragette founded Britain's Women's Social and Political Union, whose jailed members refused food?
Emmeline Pankhurst
Emmeline Pankhurst founded the all-women union in 1903; she and her daughters were repeatedly jailed, and members who would not eat were often force-fed.
Q 30Which American suffragist was arrested in Rochester for casting a ballot in the 1872 presidential election?
Susan B. Anthony
Susan B. Anthony was fined $100 and told the judge she would never pay a dollar of it; she never did, and the authorities let the matter drop.