Famous quotes containing the words government, higher and/or secondary:
“What is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?”
—James Madison (1751–1836)
“The true thrift is always to spend on the higher plane; to invest and invest, with keener avarice, that he may spend in spiritual creation, and not in augmenting animal existence. Nor is the man enriched, in repeating the old experiments of animal sensation; nor unless through new powers and ascending pleasures he knows himself by the actual experience of higher good to be already on the way to the highest.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Cloud-clown, blue painter, sun as horn,
Hill-scholar, man that never is,
The bad-bespoken lacker,
Ancestor of Narcissus, prince
Of the secondary men. There are no rocks
And stones, only this imager.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)