Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Slavery is no scholar, no improver; it does not love the whistle of the railroad; it does not love the newspaper, the mailbag, a college, a book or a preacher who has the absurd whim of saying what he thinks; it does not increase the white population; it does not improve the soil; everything goes to decay.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "The Fugitive Slave Law." Miscellanies. Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1884, p. 227.
In Russia at the time, serfs were little better off than slaves. Not only did they have to obey their landlords in all things, but any who advocated disobedience on their part were beaten and sent to Siberia. Exile to the Siberian Gulags was not an invention of the Communists of the 20th century although they used that punishment in unprecedented numbers. It was used by the Czars and the Empress.
Southern secession and the Civil War This is one of the major quotations with which historians rebut the revisionist view that the Civil War was about States’ Rights or other economic factors.
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.
