Ralph Waldo Emerson Reform Quotations

Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances

It is handsomer to remain in the establishment better than the establishment, and conduct that in the best manner, than to make asally against evil by some single improvement, without supporting it by a total regeneration.

A great licentiousness treads on the heels of a reformation.

All reform aims, in some one particular, to let the soul have its way through us; in other words, to engage us to obey.

The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.

The religions are obsolete when the reforms do not proceed from them.

Every reform was once a private opinion.

Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of the age.

Conservatism stands on man's confessed limitations; reform on his indisputable infinitude; conservatism on circumstance; liberalism on power; one goes to make an adroit member of the social frame; the other to postpone all things to the man himself.