Howard Mumford Jones quotes:

When he died, Emerson was thought of as the representative American writer par excellence, and his point of view was still so potent that William James was honored to be asked to speak at a centenary celebration.

I, for one, hope that youth will again revolt and again demoralize the dead weight of conformity that now lies upon us.

Emerson was the chief figure in the American transcendental movement, a fact that complicates all accounts of him in literary or cultural history.

Emerson then incarnated the moral optimism, the progress, and the energy of the American spirit.

Persecution is the first law of society because it is always easier to suppress criticism than to meet it.

Except to heaven, she is nought; Except for angels, lone; Except to some wide-wandering bee, A flower superfluous blown; Except for winds, provincial; Except by butterflies, Unnoticed as a single dew That on the acre lies

Ours is the age which is proud of machines that think and suspicious of men who try to.

If the equality of individuals and the dignity of man be myths, they are myths to which the republic is committed.

The incessant struggle of the mind to be true to itself, to absorb new truths, to grow, to overcome pressures--these are the painful portion of the independent thinker. Almost his sole reward is the satisfaction of integrity.

To find out what we presently are and where we are going, we must know what we have been and what others have done; and this, because the humanities are at once the creation and the interpreters of the past, is the great purpose of humanistic scholarship.