"Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate." -Henry David Thoreau
Walden consists of 18 chapters, and the first, "Economy," is the source of this quote and acts, in part, as a preface. It is also the chapter in which Thoreau lays out the details of his sociological experiment (and home to some other well-known Thoreau lines). "Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them," Thoreau said, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."
