Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
If I quake, what matters it what I quake at? Our proper vice takes form in one or another shape, according to the sex, age, or temperament of the person, and, if we are capable of fear, will readily find terrors.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Courage." Society and Solitude: Twelve Chapters, Fields, Osgood, & Co., 1870, p. 237.
The President later addressed this in his "We have nothing to fear but fear itself" speech – See {636844}.
According to Burns, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, while drafting his First Inaugural Address, was reading some Thoreau material and was so impressed with this thought relative to the fear that the Great Depression had brought to the American people, that he used it in his speech/ See {636844}. Also, see Queen Elizabeth I {636845}.
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.
