Sourced and curated.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low; the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

Come mothers and fathers, Throughout the land And don't criticize What you can't understand.

I Have a Dream · 1963

★ 8.6

Song · Protest music · Folk music

Bob Dylan

The Times They Are a-Changin' (song) · 1964

★ 7.6

Letter

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

Isaac Newton

1676

★ 7.4

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

Frederick Douglass

1857

★ 7.3

Speech

Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

Mark Twain

1884

★ 7.1

Philosophical literature

The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

Karl Marx

Theses on Feurbach · 1845

★ 7.1

Sermon

We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.

1968

★ 7.1

Essay · Political literature

James Madison

Federalist 51 · 1788

★ 7.0

If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.

Frederick Douglass

1857

★ 7.0

We are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness of sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size.

Bernard of Chartres

1159

★ 6.9

Film · Drama (film) · Drama

Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms, greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind.

Gordon Gekko

Wall Street · 1987

★ 6.9

Song · Protest music · Folk music

Come Senators, congressmen Please heed the call Don't stand in the doorway Don't block up the hall.

Bob Dylan

The Times They Are a-Changin' (song) · 1963

★ 6.4

Poem

We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger, We the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend, Pioneers! O pioneers!

Walt Whitman

Pioneers! O Pioneers! · 1867

★ 5.6

The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The House of the Seven Gables · 1851

★ 5.2

Song · Pop music

Got to kick at the darkness 'til it bleeds daylight.

Bruce Cockburn

Lovers in a Dangerous Time · 1984

★ 5.2

Interview

Justice is love on legs, spilling over into the public sphere.

Cornel West

2009

★ 4.6

There can be no progress (real, that is, moral) except in the individual and by the individual himself.

Charles Baudelaire

1867

★ 4.5

Feminist literature

If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.

Camille Paglia

Sexual Personae · 1990

★ 4.5

She assured them, too, of her firm belief, that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven's own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Scarlet Letter · 1850

★ 4.4

Speech

Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned... Until there are no longer first-class and second-class citizens of any nation... Until the color of a man's skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes... Until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race... Until that day, the dream of lasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained.

Haile Selassie I

1963

★ 4.4

The advancement of the arts from year to year taxes our credulity, and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end.

Henry L. Ellsworth

1843

★ 4.3

Open letter · Letter

"Wait" has almost always meant "Never."

The man with a new idea is a Crank until the idea succeeds.

Letter from Birmingham Jail · 1963

★ 4.0

Travel writing

Mark Twain

Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World · 1897

★ 4.0

We cannot reform our forefathers.

George Eliot

Adam Bede · 1859

★ 3.9

Essay · Political literature

To think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration.

George Orwell

Politics and the English Language · 1946

★ 3.9

A revolution is a struggle to the death between the future and the past.

Fidel Castro

1961

★ 3.9

The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.

Barack Obama

1965

★ 3.9

Play

Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.

Oscar Wilde

A Woman of No Importance · 1893

★ 3.8

Personal journal

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them.

Mark Twain

1897

★ 3.8

Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.

Willa Cather

Death Comes for the Archbishop · 1929

★ 3.8

Essay

Clinging to the past is the problem. Embracing change is the solution.

Gloria Steinem

1994

★ 3.8

Letter

I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy.

John Adams

1780

★ 3.7

Poem · Philosophical literature

Improvement makes straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of Genius.

William Blake

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell · 1793

★ 3.7

The age of chivalry is past. Bores have succeeded to dragons.

Benjamin Disraeli

1831

★ 3.7

Finality, Sir, is not the language of politics.

Benjamin Disraeli

1859

★ 3.7

Essay

It is because Humanity has never known where it was going that it has been able to find its way.

Oscar Wilde

Intentions · 1891

★ 3.7

Sermon

The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided man.

1961

★ 3.7