Philanthropic and religious bodies do not commonly make their executive officers out of saints.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that executive leaders in philanthropic and religious organizations are not typically virtuous individuals.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote implies a critique of the leadership within philanthropic and religious institutions, indicating that such organizations tend to prioritize practical, often self-interested individuals for leadership roles, rather than those who are purely altruistic or morally upright. This perspective raises important questions about the nature of leadership and motivation within organizations that are meant to serve the greater good, suggesting a complex relationship between human nature and institutional goals.
In practice
During a nonprofit conference, one might quote Emerson to highlight the challenges in finding truly altruistic leaders.
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?
There's this sense that whiteness is the default and does not need to be questioned. That you've got a race if you're black, or any kind of Asian, or any kind of Native American, but that you have no race if you are white.
Both force and money are impotent against ideas.
Order and reason, beauty and benevolence, are characteristics and conceptions which we find solely associated with the mind of man.
It might be a good idea if, like the White Queen, we practiced believing six impossible things every morning before breakfast, for we are called on to believe what to many people is impossible. Instead of rejoicing in this glorious "impossible" which gives meaning and dignity to our lives, we try to domesticate God, to make his might actions comprehensible to our finite minds.
I was born in 1948, so I'm a '60s kid, and in the '60s everyone talked all the time, endlessly, about socialism versus capitalism, about political choices, ideology, Marxism, revolution, 'the system' and so on.
What if, when this fog scatters and flies upward, the whole rotten, slimey city goes with it, rises with the fog and vanishes like smoke.
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