Episode

You Have No Right To Turn Away

Podcast
Quintus Curtius
Published
Nov 15, 2025
Duration seconds
467
Processing state
not_requested
Canonical source
https://soundcloud.com/quintus-curtius-536484035/you-have-no-right-to-turn-away
Audio
https://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/2213213609-quintus-curtius-536484035-you-have-no-right-to-turn-away.mp3
JSON
/v1/public/podcasts/quintus-curtius-216861/episodes/you-have-no-right-to-turn-away
Markdown
/podcast/quintus-curtius-216861/you-have-no-right-to-turn-away.md

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Summary

In an 1842 letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle chastised Emerson, saying, "A man has no right to say to his generation, turning away from it, 'Be Damned!' It is the whole past and the whole future, this same cotton-spinning, dollar-hunting, canting and shrieking, very wretched generation of ours. Come back into it, I tell you." What did he mean by this? And what importance does Carlyle's admonition have for us today? We discuss.