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?
Once she remembered trying to box her own ears for having cheated herself in a game of croquet she was playing against herself, for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people.
'Thou shalt not kill' does not apply to murder of one's own kind only, but to all living beings and this commandment was inscribed in the human breast long before it was proclaimed from Sinai.
We all have appointments with the past.
The greater the diversity, the greater the perfection.
There's nothing like impending death to rouse you from existential boredom.
Religion is the possibility of the removal of every ground of confidence except confidence in God alone.
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