Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them.
Interpretation
Emerson believes that the masses need guidance and education rather than praise, advocating for individual thought and empowerment.
In this quote, Ralph Waldo Emerson expresses a critical view of the masses, suggesting that their collective demands and influences can be harmful or detrimental. Rather than simply flattering the masses, he advocates for a more rigorous approach to shaping individuals within society, emphasizing the importance of education and individualistic values over conformity. Emerson's intent is to uplift and empower individuals by breaking down the passive tendencies of the crowd, encouraging each person to think and act independently.
In practice
In a lecture about leadership, one might use this quote to emphasize the importance of educating people rather than just catering to popular opinion.
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?
Curious indeed how these things happen. The wand chooses the wizard, remember...I think we must expect great things from you, Mr. Potter... After all, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named did great things β terrible, yes, but great.
You have agency, and you are free to choose. But there is actually no free agency. Agency has its price. You have to pay the consequences of your choices.
I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.
For this reason, strangers are not really conceived as individuals, but as strangers of a particular type: the element of distance is no less general in regard to them than the element of nearness.
Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter?
In Trinidad, where as new arrivals we were a disadvantaged community, that excluding idea was a kind of protection; it enabled us - for the time being, and only for the time being - to live in our own way and according to our own rules, to live in our own fading India.
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