"The pest of society are the egotist,..." - Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson
The pest of society are the egotist, they are dull and bright, sacred and profane, course and fine. It is a disease that like the flu falls on all constitutions.
More by Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Nor sequent centuries could hitOrbit and sum of SHAKSPEARE's wit.The men who lived with him becamePoets, for the air was fame.”
“A collector recently bought at public auction, in London, for one hundred and fifty-seven guineas, an autograph of Shakespeare; but for nothing a school-boy can read Hamlet and can detect secrets of highest concernment yet unpublished therein.”
“Who shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing that there is no practical question on which anything more than an approximate solution can be had?”
More on Egotism
“I know perfectly well my own egotism.”
“Modest egotism is the salt of conversation; you do not want too much of it, but if it is altogether omitted, everything tastes flat.”
“The goitre of egotism is so frequent among notable persons, that we must infer some strong necessity in nature which it subserves;such as we see in the sexual attraction.”
More on Society
“What is true of every member of the society, individually, is true of them all collectively; since the rights of the whole can be no more than the sum of the rights of the individuals.”
“We have believed - and we do believe now - that freedom is indivisible, that peace is indivisible, that economic prosperity is indivisible”
“The newspaper that obstructs the law on a trivial pretext, for money's sake, is a dangerous enemy to the public weal. That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse.”