The antidote to this abuse of formal Government, is, the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual.
Interpretation
Individual character and personal growth counteract the negative aspects of government.
Ralph Waldo Emerson emphasizes the importance of personal integrity and the development of the individual as a remedy for the misuse of governmental power. He suggests that strong and virtuous individual character can help to mitigate the adverse effects of formal structures of government, encouraging people to grow and develop themselves in ways that positively influence society.
In practice
In a speech about civic responsibility, you might quote Emerson to emphasize the need for personal integrity.
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?
All of our actions have in their doing the seed of their undoing. ... That in her creation of her children there should be the unspeakable promise of their death, for by their birth she had created mortal beings.
The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.
The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded.
True, nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am, but why will say that I am mad?! The disease had haunted my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them. Of all the sense of hearing acute.
The truly holy person welcomes all that is earthly.
Every phenomenon of nature was a word, - the sign, symbol and pledge of a new, mysterious, inexpressible but all the more intimate union, participation and community of divine energies and ideas.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.