Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

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.