Government has been a fossil: it should be a plant.
Interpretation
Government should evolve and grow like a living organism instead of being outdated and stagnant.
In this quote, Ralph Waldo Emerson suggests that government should not be a rigid and unchanging structure, akin to a fossil, but rather, it should be dynamic and capable of growth, like a plant. This metaphor emphasizes the importance of adaptability and innovation in governance, advocating for systems that can respond to the changing needs of society instead of remaining fossilized in outdated practices.
In practice
During a speech on reform, one might say, 'Like Emerson stated, government has been a fossil; it should be a plant to thrive with society.'
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?
In our rather stupid time, hunting is belittled and misunderstood, many refusing to see it for the vital vacation from the human condition that it is, or to acknowledge that the hunter does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, he kills in order to have hunted.
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look
You were the dead; theirs was the future.
I got a label because I was Hispanic and a woman and [therefore] I had to be liberal.
Anybody who is one with what he or she does is building the new earth.
One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.