Anyone can be a barbarian; it requires a terrible effort to be or remain a civilized man.
Society Quotes
Shakespeare, Emerson, Rousseau, Milton and John Stuart Mill lead the page. The sourced picks include Shaw’s remark in O’Flaherty V.C. (1919) that you will never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race, and a Martin Luther King sermon from 1967 on a man who talked as if he could build his barns alone.
Three entries have flags. “One man with courage makes a majority” is credited to Andrew Jackson, and the notes say it has never been found in his writings. Robert Kennedy and Ronald Reagan both repeated the attribution. “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons” is credited to Dostoyevsky and flagged misattributed. The “I expect to pass through this world but once” passage, credited to Stephen Grellet, is disputed. The first known print is a June 1869 magazine, writing of an unnamed Quaker.
You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.
I never have sought the world; the world was not to seek me.
The world in all doth but two nations bear —
The good, the bad; and these mixed everywhere.
One day with life and heart
Is more than time enough to find a world.
The world cannot be translated; it can only be dreamed of and touched.
The most important things about the individual are what he cannot or will not say.
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.