Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Liberty is to the collective body, what health is to every individual body. Without health no pleasure can be tasted by man; without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society.

You judge a society by how it treats its citizens. We must do our best to ensure that every child can live in comfort and security, with the best possible education.

It may be argued that peoples for whom philosophers legislate are always prosperous.

It is the historic glory of the intellectual class of the West in modern times that, of all the classes which could be called in any sense privileged, it has shown the largest and most consistent concern for the well-being of the classes which lie below it in the social scale.

The mother is the most precious possessions of the nation, so precious that society advances its highest well-being when it protects the functions of the mother.

Key West, unfortunately, is becoming rather literary and artistic.

All men are intellectuals, but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals.

We can all agree that in the wealthiest nation on Earth, all children should have the basic nutrition they need to learn and grow and to pursue their dreams, because in the end, nothing is more important than the health and well-being of our children... These are the basic values that we all share, regardless of race, party, religion. This is what we share. These are the values that this bill embodies.

Bohemia and all its works are vanished out of America; or, more exactly, bohemia has migrated to the middle class, and is alive and well in condo and suburb.

Every single thing I've done, from the Affordable Care Act to pushing to raise the minimum wage, to making sure that young people are able to go to college and get good job training, to what we're pushing now in terms of sick paid leave,everything I do has been focused on how do we make sure the middle class is getting a fair deal.

...it happens that society is saved as often as the circle of its ruling class is narrowed, as often as a more exclusive interest asserts itself over the general. Every demand for the most simple bourgeois financial reform, for the most ordinary liberalism, for the most commonplace republicanism, for the flattest democracy is forthwith punished as an assault upon society and is branded as Socialism.

We have moved into an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society. We are still called upon to give aid to the beggar who finds himself in misery and agony on life's highway. But one day, we must ask the question of whether an edifice which produces beggars must not be restructured and refurbished.

True science investigates and brings to human perception such truths and such knowledge as the people of a given time and society consider most important. Art transmits these truths from the region of perception to the region of emotion.

Capitalism has created the highest standard of living ever known on earth. The evidence is incontrovertible. The contrast between West and East Berlin is the latest demonstration, like a laboratory experiment for all to see. Yet those who are loudest in proclaiming their desire to eliminate poverty are loudest in denouncing capitalism. Man's well-being is not their goal.

A sort of moral blackmail is exerted from both poles. The underclass, one gathers, should be dulled with charity and welfare provision lest it turn nasty. The upper class must likewise be conciliated by vast handouts, lest it lose the "incentive" to go on generating wealth.

Since when has Finland been a rotten place to live in?

Good government is known from bad government by this infallible test: that under the former the labouring people are well fed and well clothed, and under the latter, they are badly fed and badly clothed.

Rich widows are the only secondhand goods that sell at first-class prices.

The United States has got to join the rest of the industrialized world in making sure that working families of the middle class have benefits that they absolutely need. We are the only major country on Earth that does not guarantee health care to all people as a right. We are the only major country on Earth that does not provide paid family and medical leave. There are many countries around the world which make sure that public colleges and universities are tuition-free. In our country, it's becoming increasingly difficult to afford to go to college.

Economics spreads happiness.

I've had very little negative pushback. I think people in the Senate know that I have believed, for a number of years, and have been outspoken that we need to listen to what the American people are telling us, and we need to focus more on the well-being of people who make lower wages, $50,000 and below.

No public interest is anything other or nobler than a massed accumulation of private interests.

When the literary class betray a destitution of faith, it is not strange that society should be disheartened and sensualized by unbelief.

There is only one core issue in the immigration debate, and that issue is the well being of the American people.

What, after all, was the point of civilisation if not the well-being of citizens?