I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested--'But these impulses may be from below, not from above.' I replied, 'They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the devil's child, I will live them from the devil.

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.

"
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.