Quotation by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our culture, therefore, must not omit the arming of the man. Let him hear in season, that he is born into the state of war, and that the commonwealth and his own well-being require that he should not go dancing in the weeds of peace, but warned, self- collected, and neither defying nor dreading the thunder, let him take both reputation and life in his hand, and, with perfect urbanity, dare the gibbet and the mob by the absolute truth of his speech, and the rectitude of his behaviour.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), U.S. essayist, poet, philosopher. "Heroism," Essays, First Series (1841, repr. 1847).

A gibbet is a gallows, hence, this is a particularly fierce and bloody articulation of Emersonian individualism.
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