"That excitement about Kossuth, consider how characteristic,..." - Quote by Henry David Thoreau
That excitement about Kossuth, consider how characteristic, but superficial, it was!--only another kind of politics or dancing. Men were making speeches to him all over the country, but each expressed only the thought, or the want of thought, of the multitude. No man stood on truth. They were merely banded together, as usual one leaning on another, and all together on nothing.
More by Henry David Thoreau
“The best thing a man can do for his culture when he is rich is to endeavor to carry out those schemes which he entertained when he was poor”
“How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?”
“It becomes the moralist, too, to inquire what man might do to improve and beautify the system; what to make the stars shine more brightly, the sun more cheery and joyous, the moon more placid and content.”
More on Society
“The happiness of society depends so much on preventing party spirit from infecting the common intercourse of life, that nothing should be spared to harmonize and amalgamate the two parties in social circles.”
“The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.”
“Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it”
More on Politics
“Men can never escape being governed. Either they must govern themselves or they must submit to being governed by others.”
“In the first place, then, men should guard against the beginning of change, and in the second place they should not rely upon the political devices of which I have already spoken invented only to deceive the people, for they are proved by experience to be useless.”
“Mankind will never see an end of trouble until lovers of wisdom come to hold political power, or the holders of power become lovers of wisdom”