Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Our government wasn't created to be efficient. It was created to preserve the individual.

All government and all private institutions must be designed to promote and protect and defend the integrity and the dignity of the individual. And that is the essential meaning of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

In all that the people can individually do as well for themselves, government ought not to interfere.

The individual is greater than the state.

our society -- unlike most in the world -- presupposes that freedom and liberty are in a frame of reference that makes the individual, not government, the keeper of his tastes, beliefs, and ideas.

… not to destroy individualism but to protect it

As an American, you can do whatever you want to do, and you can choose whatever side you want to be on.

America is about choices, including those to live certain lifestyles.

I fight for the right to be an individual. I have to be meself.

Mankind is at its best when it is most free.

Every child has a right to its own bent. . . . It has a right to find its own way and go its own way, whether that way seems wise or foolish to others, exactly as an adult has. It has a right to privacy as to its own doings and its own affairs as much as if it were its own father.

Every man has a right to his own opinion. Every race has a right to its own action; therefore let no man persuade you against your will, let no other race influence you against your own.

The way to be a bore is to say everything.

I grew up thinking there was one unpardonable sin – to be boring.

Almost all human affairs are tedious. Everything is too long. Visits, dinners, concerts, plays, speeches, pleadings, essays, sermons, are too long. Pleasure and business labor equally under this defect, or, as I should rather say, this fatal super-abundance.

The problem with this world is that there isn't enough liberty and freedom.

I have to respect my life, and free expression is part of my life. I can never really silence myself.

It is tedious to tell again tales already plainly told.

I believe in Liberty for all men: the space to stretch their arms and their souls.

And I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these United States.

Each of us possesses a tangible living soul. The system has no such thing. We must not allow the system to exploit us.

Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.

Man cannot demand that others give up their lives to make him happy.

The point I wish plainly to bring before you on this occasion is the individuality of each human soul--our Protestant idea, the right of individual conscience and judgment--our republican idea, individual citizenship. In discussing the rights of woman, we are to consider, first, what belongs to her as an individual, in a world of her own, the arbiter of her own destiny, an imaginary Robinson Crusoe with her woman Friday on a solitary island. Her rights under such circumstances are to use all her faculties for her own safety and happiness.

The bore is good for promoting sleep; but though he causeth sleep in others, it is uncertain whether he ever sleeps himself; as few can keep awake in his company long enough to see. It is supposed that when he sleeps it is with his mouth open.