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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.

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Revelation … unavoidably challenges the institution and established power, no matter what form this may take. But the adulteration by political power has changed all this. Christianity has become a religion of conformity, of integration into the social body. It has come to be regarded as useful for social cohesion (the exact opposite of what it is in its source and truth). Alternatively, it has become a flight from political or concrete reality, a flight into the spiritual world, into the cultivation of the inner life, into mysticism, and hence an evasion of the present world.

Jacques Ellul The Subversion of Christianity (1984)

Socialism as the final concept of duty, the ethical duty of work, not just for oneself but also for one's fellow man's sake, and above all the principle: Common good before own good, a struggle against all parasitism and especially against easy and unearned income. And we were aware that in this fight we can rely on no one but our own people. We are convinced that socialism in the right sense will only be possible in nations and races that are Aryan, and there in the first place we hope for our own people and are convinced that socialism is inseparable from nationalism.

Adolf Hitler

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