| civil disobedience | |
| —n | |
| a refusal to obey laws, pay taxes, etc: a nonviolent means of protesting or of attempting to achieve political goals | |
| an extraordinary or unusual thing, person, or event; an exceptional example or instance. |
| a printed punctuation mark (‽), available only in some typefaces, designed to combine the question mark (?) and the exclamation point (!), indicating a mixture of query and interjection, as after a rhetorical question. |
The refusal to obey a law out of a belief that the law is morally wrong.
Note: In the nineteenth century, the American author Henry David Thoreau wrote “Civil Disobedience,” an important essay justifying such action.
Note: In the twentieth century, civil disobedience was exercised by Mahatma Gandhi in the struggle for independence in India. Civil disobedience, sometimes called nonviolent resistance or passive resistance, was also practiced by some members of the civil rights movement in the United States, notably Martin Luther King, Jr., to challenge segregation of public facilities; a common tactic of these civil rights supporters was the sit-in. King defended the use of civil disobedience in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”