“What do I owe to my times, to my country, to my neighbors, to my friends? Such are the questions which a virtuous man ought often to ask himself.” — Lavater

“What the people want is very simple. They want an America as good as its promise.” — Barbara Jordan, 20th-century congresswoman and professor

“A nation, as a society, forms a moral person, and every member of it is personally responsible for his society.” — Thomas Jefferson, 18th-century American Founding Father, early 19th-century U.S. president (letter to George Hammond, 1792)

“It is strangely absurd to suppose that a million of human beings, collected together, are not under the same moral laws which bind each of them separately.” — Thomas Jefferson, 18th-century American Founding Father, early 19th-century U.S. president (letter to George Logan, 1816)

“Public virtue is a kind of ghost town into which anyone can move and declare himself sheriff.” — Saul Bellow, Nobel Prize-winning 20th-century American author

“Americanism is a question of principles, of idealism, of character: it is not a matter of birthplace or creed or line of descent.” — Theodore Roosevelt, 19th/20th-century American adventurer and politician, Nobel Prize-winning U.S. president

“If we are forced, at every hour, to watch or listen to horrible events, this constant stream of ghastly impressions will deprive even the most delicate among us of all respect for humanity.” — Cicero (Marcus Tullius), Roman orator, philosopher and statesman

“Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson, 19th-century American essayist, public philosopher and poet

“In a time of social fragmentation, vulgarity becomes a way of life. To be shocking becomes more important — and often more profitable — than to be civil or creative or truly original.’’ — Al Gore, 20th-century American politician, vice president of the U.S.

“Like the body that is made up of different limbs and organs, all moral creatures must depend on each other to exist.” — Hindu proverb

“Politeness is the art of choosing among one’s real thoughts.” — Adlai Stevenson II, 20th- century American politician, presidential candidate

“We are all angels with only one wing. We can only fly while embracing each other.” — Luciano De Crescenzo

“What has always made a hell on earth has been that man has tried to make it his heaven.” — Friedrich Holderin

“Hell is other people.” — Jean-Paul Sartre, 20th-century Nobel Prize-winning, French existentialist writer (from No Exit)

“Hell is ourselves.” — Claude Levi-Strauss, 20th-century French sociologist

“It is in the shelter of each other that people live.” — Irish proverb

“Life is a place of service, and in that service one has to suffer a great deal that is hard to bear, but more often to experience a great deal of joy. But that joy can be real only if people look upon their lives as a service and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness.” — Count Leo Tolstoy, 19th-century Nobel Prize- winning Russian novelist

“But it was impossible to save the Great Republic. She was rotten to the heart. Lust of conquest had long ago done its work; trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home; multitudes who had applauded the crushing of other people’s liberties, lived to suffer for their mistake in their own persons. The government was irrevocably in the hands of the prodigiously rich and their hangers-on; the suffrage was become a mere machine, which they used as they chose. There was no principle but commercialism, no patriotism but of the pocket.” — Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), 19th-century American humorist, author and journalist