Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

A lot of my work concerns a crisis of agency - what can we do?

The leader who exercises power with honor will work from the inside out, starting with himself.

I wish I could believe that one person could make a difference.

Those above are going down, those below are going up.

Politicians are becoming mouthpieces for other forces justifying the status quo.

I have no right to be a king, but I have the right to create a king.

Powerful vested interests and the forces of conservatism are particularly strong where the observation of Christmas is concerned.

They are as blind to some of the tendencies of the time as the French Noblese was before the French Revolution.

Mysticism has been in the past and probably ever will be one of the great powers of the world and it is bad scholarship to pretend the contrary.

Given how deeply the ways of war have penetrated our collective consciousness, it will take spiritual power to turn the issue around.

An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger.

The main effect of a real revolution is perhaps that it sweeps away those who do not know how to wish, and brings to the front men with insatiable appetites for action, power and all that the world has to offer.

Men make history, not the other way around.

I like being powerful. I hope it doesn't go to my head. If somebody's going to have it, it might just as soon be me. There's always power, and it's just a matter of in whose hands it falls.

The Spirit power begins in directing the Animal power to other than egoistic ends.

Manpower without Unity is not a strength unless it is harmonized and united properly, then it becomes a spiritual power.

We just have to convince other people that they have power. This is what they can do by participating to make change, not only in their community, but many times changing in their own lives. Once they participate, they get their sense of power.

People have far more power than they realize, if they would only choose to use it.

You become most powerful in whatever you do if the action is performed for its own sake rather than as a means to protect, enhance, or conform to your role identity.

We must reject the idea... Well-intentioned, but dead wrong... That the primary path to greatness in the social sectors is to become "more like a business." Most businesses... Like most of anything else in life... Fall somewhere between mediocre and good.

Any great change must expect opposition, because it shakes the very foundation of privilege.

Authority is the spiritual dimension of power because it depends upon faith in a system of meaning that decrees the necessity of the hierarchical order and so provides for the unity of imperative control.

We thought that the proletariat would eventually run the world. But it is the Americans who have assumed that position... The American people have changed.

Power is not something we should be afraid of. Power is great, power is energy. And in terms of energy, the most important energy is human spiritual energy and when I say spiritual, I feel like have to be very careful, I don't mean religious, I mean the energy of the mind, the energy that exists within us.

Capitalism will never fall on its own. It will have to be pushed. The accumulation of capital will never cease. It will have to be stopped. The capitalist class will never willingly surrender its power. It will have to be dispossessed.