"When at last in a race a..." - Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.”

“But the nomads were the terror of all those whom the soil or the advantages of the market had induced to build towns. Agriculture therefore was a religious injunction, because of the perils of the state from nomadism.”

“Men should take their knowledge from the Sun, the Moon and the Stars.”

“I am overwhelmed with things I ought to have written about and never found the proper words.”

“Everyone sits in the prison of his own ideas; he must burst it open, and that in his youth, and so try to test his ideas on reality.”

“After me, the Revolution - or, rather the ideas which formed it - will resume their course. It will be like a book from which the marker is removed, and one starts to read again at the page where one left off.”

“But Goethe tells us in his greatest poem that Faust lost the liberty of his soul when he said to the passing moment: "Stay, thou art so fair." And our liberty, too, is endangered if we pause for the passing moment, if we rest on our achievements, if we resist the pace of progress. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past are certain to miss the future.”

“Society is an illusion to the young citizen. It lies before him in rigid repose, with certain names, men, and institutions, rootedlike oak-trees to the centre, round which all arrange themselves the best they can. But the old statesman knows that society is fluid; there are no such roots and centres; but any particle may suddenly become the centre of the movement, and compel the system to gyrate round it, as every man of strong will, like Pisistratus, or Cromwell, does for a time, and every man of truth, like Plato, or Paul, does forever.”

“If you don't like how things are, change it! You're not a tree.”