“The one thing in the world of value is the active soul.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The American Scholar (Primary source)
Delivered as a commencement address at Harvard, this speech was famously dubbed America’s Intellectual Declaration of Independence by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., an American polymath. Emerson urged American intellectuals to break free from European traditions and cultivate a uniquely American voice and scholarship, emphasizing the role of the scholar as Man Thinking.
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“The one thing in the world of value is the active soul—the soul, free, sovereign, active. This every man is entitled to; this every man contains within him, although in almost all men obstructed, and as yet unborn.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The law of nature is, do the thing, and you shall have the power: but they who do not the thing have not the power.”
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“Any man more right than his neighbors, constitutes a majority of one already.”
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— John F. Kennedy Primary source