“We must make the best of those ills which cannot be avoided.”

1900s, The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (1900), The Strenuous Life

Maxim 120
Sentences, The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus, a Roman Slave

Foreword http://www.bartleby.com/55/100.html
1910s, Theodore Roosevelt — An Autobiography (1913)
Context: We of the great modern democracies must strive unceasingly to make our several countries lands in which a poor man who works hard can live comfortably and honestly, and in which a rich man cannot live dishonestly nor in slothful avoidance of duty; and yet we must judge rich man and poor man alike by a standard which rests on conduct and not on caste, and we must frown with the same stern severity on the mean and vicious envy which hates and would plunder a man because he is well off and on the brutal and selfish arrogance which looks down on and exploits the man with whom life has gone hard.

Session 159, Page 68
The Early Sessions: Sessions 1-42, 1997, The Early Sessions: Book 4

Source: "Drug Approved. Is Disease Real?" https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/14/health/14pain.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0, New York Times (14 January 2008)

1920s, Ordered Liberty and World Peace (1924)

Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969)
Context: You cannot avoid making judgements but you can become more conscious of the way in which you make them. This is critically important because once we judge someone or something we tend to stop thinking about them or it. Which means, among other things, that we behave in response to our judgements rather than to that to which is being judged. People and things are processes. Judgements convert them into fixed states. This is one reason that judgements are often self-fulfilling. If a boy, for example, is judged as being "dumb" and a "nonreader" early in his school career, that judgement sets into motion a series of teacher behaviors that cause the judgement to become self-fulfilling. What we need to do then, if we are seriously interested in helping students to become good learners, is to suspend or delay judgements about them. One manifestation of this is the ungraded elementary school. But you can practice suspending judgement yourself tomorrow. It doesn't require any major changes in anything in the school except your own behavior.

Resolutions and Declarations (1970)
To Die For The People

Birgitte Trahelion
(15 October 1994)