America's two most important intellectual forebears are conceivably Franklin and Emerson. Franklin, however, makes us a little une...asy. Poor Richard is at once too goody-goody and too worldly. He argues the prudential approach to life almost too well: he blends copybook morality with eighteenth-century realism; his is the philosophy of the main chance without the cushioning of the noble motive. The special quality in Franklin is that he foreshadowed, with his philistine counsel, what America was to become, while indicating, through his unflinching worldliness, what it would cease to be. The better, the more central, the more congenial spokesman was Emerson, whose gift for giving a special emphasis and elevation to words has offered us a method for sliding over or circumventing things; whose fine aphorisms are the ancestors, at times even the blood brothers, of our trademarks and slogans; whose own transcendental visions coagulated or curdled into a great variety of mystical con-games; and whose deep concern for ideas could be made a kind of evasion of realities. Unlike Poor Richard, Emerson doesn't show us up--nor for that matter, pin us down. He is genuinely great without being uncomfortably specific.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is now many years that men have resorted to the forest for fuel and the materials of the arts: the New Englander and the New Ho...llander, the Parisian and the Celt, the farmer and Robin Hood, Goody Blake and Harry Gill; in most parts of the world, the prince and the peasant, the scholar and the savage, equally require still a few sticks from the forest to warm them and cook their food. Neither could I do without them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All gentle cant and philosophizing to the contrary notwithstanding, no people in this world ever did achieve their freedom by good...y-goody talk and moral suasion: it being immutable law that all revolutions that will succeed, must begin in blood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »