Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous or when they are most luxurious-they are conservatives after dinner.
Interpretation
People tend to become conservative when they are comfortable or complacent.
Ralph Waldo Emerson suggests that during times of relaxation and abundance, individuals may lean towards conservative views and reluctance to change, indicating a psychological state influenced by comfort. This reflects a broader understanding of human behavior, where the lack of challenge or necessity can lead to stagnant thinking and an adherence to the status quo.
In practice
During a lecture on political philosophy, you can use this quote to illustrate how personal comfort influences political attitudes.
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?
You can't have capitalism without racism.
A person may be greedy, envious, cowardly, cold, ungenerous, unkind, vain, or conceited, but behave perfectly by a monumental act of the will.
It is much easier to do something than to trust in God; we mistake panic for inspiration.
I believe in mysticism, with an interior goal, _x000D_ and you are your own temple _x000D_ and your own priest.
An armed society is a polite society.
The purely emotional form of Pietism is, as Ritschl has pointed out, a religious dilettantism for the leisure class.
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