Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

No one can go on being a rebel too long without becoming an autocrat.

Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle.

They (tyrants) should be attacked, not as ordinary enemies, but as assassins and rebellious brigands. Kings, aristocrats, tyrants, whoever they may be, are slaves in revolt against the sovereign of the land, who is the human race, and against the legislator of the Universe, who is Nature.

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.

I'm done with rules that are there just to be rules.

I am an enemy of the State. But isn't everyone?

Whoever lays his hand on me to govern me is a usurper and tyrant, and I declare him my enemy.

Moses lifting up his wand, and dividing the Red Sea, and Pharaoh in his chariot overwhelmed with the waters. This motto: "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God."

Children live in occupied territory. The brave and the foolhardy openly rebel against authority, whether harsh or benign. But most tread warily, outwardly accommodating themselves to alien mores and edicts while living in secret their iconoclastic and subversive lives.

Long live freedom and damn the ideologies.

Power is never so overwhelming that there's no room for resistance.

I was seen in earlier years by family members and people of authority as somebody wasting his time. I had trouble with the restrictions of conformity. It made me edgy.

Everywhere that freedom stirs, let tyrants fear.

How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.

My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things.

Common tyrants, and public oppressors, are not intitled to obedience from their subjects, by virtue of any thing here laid down by the inspired apostle.

Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic.

I don't run behind authority.

I rebelled against all form of authority, against my grandfather, my step-father, the Church, the police, the government, the bosses. Everything male that was there, and was determining my life.

I'm such a Goody Two-shoes, but I get a vicarious thrill at someone sticking it to the Man.

People demand freedom only when they have no power.

So I'm not very popular here with those inside the system, as you might guess. I never wanted to be.

Rules are made for people who aren't willing to make up their own.

The great are only great because we are on our knees. Let us rise!

He that rebels against reason is a real rebel, but he that in defence of reason rebels against tyranny has a better title to Defender of the Faith, than George the Third.