Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
The world is filled with the proverbs and acts and winkings of a base prudence, which is a devotion to matter, as if we possessedno other faculties than the palate, the nose, the touch, the eye and ear; a prudence which adores the Rule of Three, which never subscribes, which never gives, which seldom lends, and asks but one question of any project,--Will it bake bread?
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Prudence." Essays: First Series, James Munroe and Company, 1841, p. 189.
See {625339} and {622808} for similar conservative views.
Ironically, Boesky was convicted the following year of insider dealing on the New York Stock Exchange and sentenced to three years in prison.
There was a great deal of war profiteering during the American Revolution and Gerard thought that this was a negative indicator of prospects for America. Things actually got worse during the war of 1812 where there was war profiteering also and many in New England profited from selling supplies to the British enemy. Unfortunately, taking economic advantage of a wartime crisis has accompanied virtually every war in which we have become engaged. In WWII, the automobile industry virtually blackmailed the government into high profits if they would produce war material instead of cars, and the rapaciousness of Haliburton in the Iraq war became a national scandal. See George Washington’s comment on the time {624228}.
See Conrad Black {622808} for a real life version of this idea.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
She was commenting on the incident when in 2013, Congress awarded its highest honor to the 4 young Black girls who were murdered in Birmingham, Alabama at the height of the Civil Rights Movement by the KKK who set off a bomb in the 16th Street Baptist Church. The sister of Addie Mae Collins, one of the murdered girls, who herself was wounded in the bombing, refused the medal on behalf of her dead sister. She resented the fact that it had taken all these years for Congress to make this gesture and then would not do anything that might cost money such as monetary restitution. When the Muslim terrorists murdered people in the 9-11 World Trade Center attacks, Congress swiftly arranged for restitution payments to go to the relatives of the murdered victims and to those wounded. However to many people, when white terrorists murder black victims no restitution many comes forth—only a medal. See {634035} for the sister’s statement.
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.
