"We live in a very low state..." - Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson
We live in a very low state of the world, and pay unwilling tribute to government founded on force. There is not, among the most religious and instructed men of the most religious and civil nations, a reliance on the moral sentiment, and a sufficient belief in the unity of things to persuade them that society can be maintained without artificial restraints, as well as the solar system; or that the private citizen might be reasonable, and a good neighbor, without the hint of a jail or a confiscation.
More by Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Consider what you have in the smallest well-chosen library-a company of the wisest and wittiest men which can be plucked out of all civilized countries in a thousand years. The men themselves were then hidden and inaccessible. They were solitary, impatient of interruption, and fenced by etiquette. But now they are immortal, and the thought they did not reveal, even to their bosom friends, is here written out in transparent words of light to us, who are strangers of another age.”
“In the first place, all books that get fairly into the vital air of the world were written by the successful class, by the affirming and advancing class, who utter what tens of thousands feel though they cannot say.”
“Men are lenses through which we read our own minds.”
More on Society
“We shall probably get nearest to the truth if we think of the conscious and personal psyche as resting upon the broad basis of an inherited and universal psychic disposition which is as such unconscious, and that our personal psyche bears the same relation to the collective psyche as the individual to society.”
“The past lies like a nightmare upon the present.”
“The job of the school is to teach so well that family background is no longer an issue.”
More on Government
“We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.... [The organized moneyed people] are unanimous in their hate for me and I welcome their hatred.... I should like to have it said of my second administration that these forces met their master.”
“Make sure people get educated, help out with health emergencies. Those things, the government should do. That's 96 per cent of the economy, those two sectors.”
“There is no kind of dishonesty into which otherwise good people more easily and frequently fall than that of defrauding the government.”