Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place…

The sentence comes from Civil Disobedience. If a thousand men, a hundred, ten, “ay, if one honest man” withdrew from partnership with a state that supports slavery and were locked up for it, Thoreau says, it would be the abolition of slavery in America. He points to his neighbour Samuel Hoar, sent by Massachusetts to South Carolina to defend its black sailors and driven out of Charleston: if such a man sat down “the prisoner of Massachusetts”, the Legislature could not ignore it. Hence the line: the prisons are “the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor”.

In July 1846 Thoreau had spent a night in Concord jail for refusing to pay his poll tax, in protest against slavery and the Mexican war. He lectured on it in 1848 and published it in 1849 as “Resistance to Civil Government”; the title Civil Disobedience dates from a posthumous collection of 1866.

Gandhi and Martin Luther King both acknowledged the essay; the sentence has been quoted by prisoners of conscience ever since.

Civil Disobedience (Resistance to Civil Government), 1849

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