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.