Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold companion.

Emerson. Emancipation is the demand of civilization". I wish to learn this language not that I may know a new grammar but that I may read the great book that is written in that tongue.

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His essays remain among the linchpins of American thinking[citation needed] and his work has greatly influenced the thinkers writers and poets that have followed him. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of publiRalph Waldo Emersond essays and more than 1500 public lectures across the United States. Together with Nature these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson's most fertile period.