- Every thing is trivial and it changes over time
- Emerson wrote during pre-civil war era. 20 years before civil war
- Don't act like your good if you really aren't good
- when something is good lets call it that!
"I will go to prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies; — though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold."
- Not against charity or generosity but says we have to do it the right way
"Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule. There is the man and his virtues. Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade."
- Some people are not very nice but they do a good deed to make up for it
He is a retained attorney, and these airs of the bench are the emptiest affectation. Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion.
- he uses attorney as they are bound to not tell the truth by the law
- not only do people stop speaking for themselves for other people and sometimes saying we stop saying no and Emerson says there are consequences
"But when to their feminine rage the indignation of the people is added, when the ignorant and the poor are aroused, when the unintelligent brute force that lies at the bottom of society is made to growl and mow, it needs the habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it godlike as a trifle of no concernment."
- the games bigger than a player. Brings people with themselves and then bringing integrity
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