American Scholar Quotes

“Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The idea that we must choose between the method of "winning hearts and minds" and the method of shaping behavior presumes that we have the right to choose at all. This is to grant us a right that we would surely accord to no other power. Yet the overwhelming body of American scholarship accords us this right.”
― Noam Chomsky, Chomsky On Anarchism

“Thinking is the function. Living is the functionary.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns, and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and out American colleges will recede in their public importance whilst they grow richer every year.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“How historians explain time is one thing, but how we live time is quite another.”
― André Aciman