Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

The historic ascent of humanity, taken as a whole, may be summarized as a succession of victories of consciousness over blind forces - in nature, in society, in man himself.

The man of the millennium is much more liberated than the man of the '90s.

Science, which has transformed the material world, gives man the power of transforming himself.

People are the common denominator of progress; no improvement is possible with unimproved people.

Progress is The law of life: man is not Man as yet.

There is one further distinguishing characteristic of man which is very specific indeed and about which there can be no dispute, and that is the faculty of self-improvement - a faculty which, with the help of circumstance, progressively develops all our other faculties.

Let us renew our faith that as free men and women we still have the power to better our lives.

At the same time it offered the hope, as it still does, that improved understanding could better the lot of mankind. For me, growing up in the 1930s, the two motivations powerfully reinforced each other.

The duration of every political phase is just as long as it takes to unveil its shortcomings and evil. While discovering its defects, it makes way for a new phase, liberated from these failings. Thus, these impairments that appear in a situation and destroy it are the very forces of human evolution, as they raise humanity to a more corrected state.

There is a constant trend in human affairs toward the perfectibility of mankind. This was plainly stated at the time of tile French Revolution and has been reasserted ever since that time, and with increasing plausibility.

The very first instrument for the improvement of the condition of men is knowledge.

To me Americanism means not only an opportunity to do better, but an imperative duty to be nobler than the rest of the world.

Learning has freed more men than all the armies in human history.

Freedom is the very essence of life, the impelling force in all intellectual and social development, the creator of every new outlook for the future of mankind.

Man will put foward a goal to raise himself to a new level to create a higher sicio-biological type.

The message of 'Star Trek,' if there is one, seems to be that we should try to live up to the very best that we're capable of.

We all have to get better as human beings and that's something you can't really get away from.

Education makes a greater difference between man and man than nature has made between man and brute.

I want to talk about the nature of human beings or how we're evolving as a race.

The only freedom worth possessing is that which gives enlargement to a people's energy, intellect, and virtues.

Perhaps we are wiser, less foolish and more far-seeing than we were two hundred years ago. But we are still imperfect in all these things, and since the turn of the century it has been remarked that neither wisdom nor virtue have increased as rapidly as the need for both.

Your highest thought, however, ye shall have it commanded unto you by me - and it is this: man is something that is to be surpassed.

Humanity unceasingly strives forward from a lower, more partial and obscure understanding of life to one more general and more lucid.

Self-denial is simply a method by which arrests his progress, and self-sacrifice a survival of the mutilation of the savage.

The thought of how far the human race would have advanced without government simply staggers the imagination.