“It might be more difficult to be a President than it ever had before. Nothing less than greatness would do.”

Diary entry (16 December 1846).

First Century, sect. 8.
Centuries of Meditations

The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman (1926)
Context: Nothing is more difficult than writing an autobiography. What should be emphasized? Just what is of general interest? It is advisable, above all, to write honestly and dispense with any of the conventional introductory protestations of modesty. For if one is called upon to tell about one's life so as to make the events that made it what it became useful to the general public, it can mean only that one must have already wrought something positive in life, accomplished a task that people recognize. Accordingly it is a matter of forgetting that one is writing about oneself, of making an effort to abjure one's ego so as to give an account, as objectively as possible, of one's life in the making and of one's accomplishments.

Wollen wir etwa die Pädagogik den Philosophen in die Hände spielen? Nichts weniger als das! Sie würden sich ungeschickt genug benehmen. Denen allein werde sie anvertraut, die mehr sind als Philosophen, darum aber auch unendlich mehr als Humanisten oder Realisten.
Source: The False Principle of our Education (1842), p. 19

2000s, Bush's Lincolnian Challenge (2002)

True Humanism (1938), p. xi.

Source: Three Lives & Tender Buttons

Quote of Degas in conversation with George Moore, later quoted by Moore in Impressions and Opinions (1891)
1876 - 1895