WIST

Great men are but life-sized. Most of them, indeed, are rather short.

Max Beerbohm (1872-1956) English parodist, caricaturist, wit, writer [Sir Henry Maximilian Beerbohm]
“A Point To Be Remembered by Very Eminent Men” (1918)
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The fact is that the work which improves the condition of mankind, the work which extends knowledge and increases power and enriches literature, and elevates thought, is not done to secure a living. It is not the work of slaves, driven to their task either by the lash of a master or by animal necessities. It is the work of men who perform it for their own sake, and not that they may get more to eat or drink, or wear, or display. In a state of society where want is abolished, work of this sort could be enormously increased.

Henry George (1839-1897) American economist
Progress and Poverty (1879)

He knows nothing, and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) British playwright and critic
Major Barbara, ch. 3 (1905)

The myth that holds that the great corporation is the puppet of the market, the powerless servant of the consumer, is, in fact one of the devices by which its power is perpetuated.

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) Canadian-American economist, diplomat, author
The Age of Uncertainty, ch. 9 (1977)

The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.

Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968) American clergyman and reformer
Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, “Where We Are Going” (1967)