Quotation by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Emerson in His Journals , ed. by Joel Porte (1982).:"Nominalist and Realist" Essays, Second Series (1844)"Ability" English Traits (1856)"Address Delivered in Concord on the Anniversary of the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies, August 1, 1844" Miscellanies (1883, repr. 1903)"Address Delivered in Concord on the Anniversary of the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies, August 1, 1884" Miscellanies (1883, repr. 1903)

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science (9) reform (8) inventions (6) change (5) nature (5) technology (5) history (5) civilization (4) plants (4) morality (4)

The population of the world is a conditional population; these are not the best, but the best that could live in the existing state of soils, gases, animals, and morals: the best that could yet live; there shall be a better, please God.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), U.S. essayist, poet, philosopher. Speech, February 7, 1844, the Mercantile Library Association, Boston, Massachusetts. "The Young American," Nature, Addresses, and Lectures (1849).

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