“Frequently misquoted as "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket."”

Journal entry (January 1819)

Frequently misquoted as "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket."
The Temper of Our Time (1967)
Context: Up to now, America has not been a good milieu for the rise of a mass movement. What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.

As quoted in Iced: The Story of Organized Crime in Canada (2009) by Stephen Schneider, chapter Five, p. 206 http://books.google.bg/books?id=ZO8jKSn25DAC&printsec=frontcover&hl=bg

Le progrès, cette grande hérésie de la décrépitude.
XI: "Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe III," II http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Edgar_Poe_III._Notes_nouvelles_sur_Edgar_Poe_%28L%E2%80%99Art_romantique%29#II
L'art romantique (1869)

6th Public Talk, Saanen (28 July 1970) 'The Mechanical Activity of Thought" in The Impossible Question (1972) Part I, Ch. 6
1970s
Context: The whole of Asia believes in reincarnation, in being reborn in another life. When you enquire what it is that is going to be born in the next life, you come up against difficulties. What is it? Yourself? What are you? a lot of words, a lot of opinions, attachments to your possessions, to your furniture, to your conditioning. Is all that, which you call the soul, going to be reborn in the next life? Reincarnation implies that what you are today determines what you will be again in the next life. Therefore behave! — not tomorrow, but today, because what you do today you are going to pay for in the next life. People who believe in reincarnation do not bother about behavior; t all; it is just a matter of belief, which has no value. Incarnate today, afresh not in the next life! Change it now completely, change with great passion, let the mind strip itself of everything, of every conditioning, every knowledge, of everything it thinks is "right" — empty it. Then you will know what dying means; and then you will know what love is. For love is not something of the past, of thought, of culture; it is not pleasure. A mind that has understood the whole movement of thought becomes extraordinarily quiet, absolutely silent. That silence is the beginning of the new.

Param ( Page 73 )

Individual Liberty (1926), Passive Resistance

1980s, Second term of office (1985–1989), Farewell Address (1989)
Context: The lesson of all this was, of course, that because we're a great nation, our challenges seem complex. It will always be this way. But as long as we remember our first principles and believe in ourselves, the future will always be ours. And something else we learned: Once you begin a great movement, there's no telling where it will end. We meant to change a nation, and instead, we changed a world.