We love force and we care very little how it is exhibited.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on humanity's fascination with power, regardless of its manifestation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote points to the inherent human attraction to force and authority, suggesting that people often admire strength and power without critically evaluating the means by which it is demonstrated. This highlights a certain ambivalence about morality; while individuals may profess to value compassion or justice, they frequently celebrate or accept harshness and domination in practice, revealing a contradiction in human nature.
In practice
In a discussion about political power dynamics, one might use this quote to illustrate the acceptance of power at any cost.
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
It especially annoys me when racists are accused of 'discrimination.' The ability to discriminate is a precious faculty; by judging all members on one 'race' to be the same, the racist precisely shows himself incapable of discrimination.
Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first makes mad.
Today we all speak, if not the same tongue, the same universal language. There is no one center, and time has lost its former coherence: East and West, yesterday and tomorrow exist as a confused jumble in each one of us. Different times and different spaces are combined in a here and now that is everywhere at once.
If a great country yields to a small country, it will conquer the small country. If a small country yields to a great country, it will be conquered by the great country.
From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it. Always I was afraid of losing happiness. This month, next year...death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again forever.
Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state. I do not know who I am. Nor what I was. I cannot hear a sound. Pain is near that will be like no pain felt before.
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