Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes About War
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For, the advantages which fashion values, are plants which thrive in very confined localities, in a few streets, namely. Out of this precinct, they go for nothing; are of no use in the farm, in the forest, in the market, in war, in the nuptial society, in the literary or scientific circle, at sea, in friendship, in the heaven of thought or virtue.
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Coal is a portable climate. It carries the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle; and it is the means of transporting itself whithersoever it is wanted. Watt and Stephenson whispered in the ear of mankind their secret, that a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and coal carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta, and with its comfort brings its industrial power.
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Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.
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War, to sane men at the present day, begins to look like an epidemic insanity, breaking out here and there like the cholera or influenza, infecting men's brains instead of their bowels.
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We shall one day learn to supersede politics by education. What we call our root-and-branch reforms of slavery, war, gambling, intemperance, is only medicating the symptoms. We must begin higher up, namely, in education.
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All history is the decline of war, though the slow decline. All that society has yet gained is mitigation; the doctrine of the right of war still remains.
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The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.
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There is a tendency in things to right themselves, and the war or revolution or bankruptcy that shatters rotten system, allows things to take a new and natural order.
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The President proclaims war, and those Senators who dissent are not those who know better, but those who can afford to...Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.
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The only compensation which war offers for its manifold mischiefs, is in the great personal qualities to which it gives scope and occasion.
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The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.
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War educates the senses, calls into action the will, perfects the physical constitution, brings men into such swift and close collision in critical moments that man measures man.
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Meantime the education of the general mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poeticyouth dreams, and prays, and paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures.
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War disorganizes, but it is to reorganize.
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A state of war or anarchy, in which law has little force, is so far valuable, that it puts every man on trial. The man of principle is known as such, and even in the fury of faction is respected.
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The House ...She lays her beams in music, In music everyone, To the cadence of the whirling world Which dances around the sun- That so they shall not be displaced By lapses or by wars, But for the love of happy souls Outlive the newest stars.
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If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own.
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There are geniuses in trade as well as in war, or the state, or letters; and the reason why this or that man is fortunate is not to be told. It lies in the man: that is all anybody can tell you about it.
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Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.
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If you have a nation of men who have risen to that height of moral cultivation that they will not declare war or carry arms, for they have not so much madness left in their brains, you have a nation of lovers, of benefactors, of true, great, and able men.
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He, who loves the bristle of bayonets, only sees in their glitter what beforehand he feels in his hand.
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Money is the representative of a certain quantity of corn or other commodity. It is so much warmth, so much bread.
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Strong men greet war, tempest, hard times. They wish, as Pindar said, to tread the floors of hell, with necessities as hard as iron.
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Emancipation is the demand of civilization. That is a principle; everything else is an intrigue.
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Nobody is glad in the gladness of another, and our system is one of war, of an injurious superiority. Every child of the Saxon race is educated to wish to be first. It is our system; and a man comes to measure his greatness by the regrets, envies, and hatreds of his competitors.
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Use makes a better soldier than the most urgent considerations of duty,--familiarity with danger enabling him to estimate the danger. He sees how much is the risk, and is not afflicted with imagination; knows practically Marshal Saxe's rule, that every soldier killed costs the enemy his weight in lead.
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Our culture, therefore, must not omit the arming of the man. Let him hear in season, that he is born into the state of war, and that the commonwealth and his own well-being require that he should not go dancing in the weeds of peace, but warned, self- collected, and neither defying nor dreading the thunder, let him take both reputation and life in his hand, and, with perfect urbanity, dare the gibbet and the mob by the absolute truth of his speech, and the rectitude of his behaviour.
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Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short in all management of human affairs.
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The cruelest foe is a masked benefactor. The wars which make history so dreary have served the cause of truth and virtue.
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If it costs ten years, and ten to recover the general prosperity, the destruction of the South is worth so much.
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