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"Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is."
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"We...advance toward a state of society in which not only each man but every impulse in each man claims carte blanche."

"People are very busy; they are so busy that when they walk in the crowds they see no one, no one but themselves; they hear no voice, no voice but their own voice!"

"In a materialistic society, the dead body of a rich man's dog is regarded as a corpse; that of a poor man, a carcass."

"The action or inaction of any government does not negate the Personal Responsibility of the citizens."

"Keep your finger on the pulse of society, take controversies with a grain of salt, lick your finger and then lift it to the wind; always know what is going on, my friend, so this world can never steer you wrong again."

"The journey of every ignorant and obedient society always ends up in the same place: In the desert!"
Explore more quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

"There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all crime mean and ugly."

"For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations."

"God had infinite time to give us.... He cut it up into a near succession of new mornings and with each therefore a new idea new inventions and new applications."

"It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature that a man having once shown himself capable of original writing is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion."

"Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors."
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