“This is what historians usually do, quibble about cause and effect when the point is, there are times when the world is in flux and the right voice in the right place can move the world. Thomas Paine and Ben Franklin, for instance. Bismark. Lenin.”

The Rights of the World Citizen (1942); a revised edition of The Rights of Man

Acceptance speech of a humanitarian award from the Human Rights Campaign, as quoted in an [ AP report (19 June 2005), and "SHe said" Issue 1325 Between The Lines News (23 June 2005) http://www.pridesource.com/article.html?article=14760

1980s, Generation of Swine (1988)
Context: There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation. It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die. Who knows? If there is in fact, a heaven and a hell, all we know for sure is that hell will be a viciously overcrowded version of Phoenix — a clean well lighted place full of sunshine and bromides and fast cars where almost everybody seems vaguely happy, except those who know in their hearts what is missing... And being driven slowly and quietly into the kind of terminal craziness that comes with finally understanding that the one thing you want is not there. Missing. Back-ordered. No tengo. Vaya con dios. Grow up! Small is better. Take what you can get...

Source: The Exiled Queen

Book III. Concerning Petitions and Axioms.
The Philosophical and Mathematical Commentaries of Proclus on the First Book of Euclid's Elements Vol. 2 (1789)

PENN Address (2004)

In 1959 during the filming of On the Beach.
This has become a standing joke about Melbourne, but it's almost certainly either apocryphal or a misquotation.
Misattributed