The line that influenced John Lewis was “I think sometimes, Why, this people mean well; they are only ignorant; they would do better if they knew how: why give your neighbors this pain to treat you as they are not inclined to?”
Henry David Thoreau advocated for civil disobedience, he wrote this essay when he was arrested for not paying a poll tax. John Lewis was a pacifist but he was heavily influenced by Thoreau ideas of disobedience of the population, but he did not agree with physical violence, instead, he said that civil disobedience should take place by “creative disruption” and “aggressive nonviolence”.