Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "The American Scholar." Nature; Addresses, and Lectures. James Munroe and Company, 1849.
Every time a court decides on the constitutionality of something that did not exist at the founding, the meaning is enlarged somewhat. For example is hacking into a computer a violation of the Due Process clause? Are Americans who are entitled to bear arms allowed to choose any arms now existent—ie biological weapons? Is a President who is brain dead but is breathing and kept alive by artificial means to be replaced by the Vice President? The U.S. Constitution is the oldest constitution of all the industrialized democracies, and yet if functions in a world the Founding Fathers would not recognize. The courts and the Amendments have kept it fundamental to our nation and still an example to the world.
Every one of us changes the world in which he have lived, and history describes that world to the degree possible, Hence we all make and determine history.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.
