“The world should take note: not everything is getting worse.”

Si nous n'avions point de défauts, nous ne prendrions pas tant de plaisir à en remarquer dans les autres.
Maxim 31.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)

Source: Choke

BBC Interview with Cecil Day Lewis (13 September 1957); transcripts published in "It Takes a Hero to Make a Poem" in the Claremont Quarterly (Spring 1958) http://www.frostfriends.org/FFL/Periodicals/Interview-lewis.html
1950s

Source: Man's Search for Meaning

Source: Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871), Ch. XXII : Grand Master Architect, p. 191
Context: We all not only have better intimations, but are capable of better things than we know. The pressure of some great emergency would develop in us powers, beyond the worldly bias of our spirits; and Heaven so deals with us, from time to time, as to call forth those better things. There is hardly a family so selfish in the world, but that, if one in it were doomed to die—one, to be selected by the others,—it would be utterly impossible for its members, parents and children, to choose out that victim; but that each would say, "I will die; but I cannot choose." And in how many, if that dire extremity had come, would not one and another step forth, freed from the vile meshes of ordinary selfishness, and say, like the Roman father and son, "Let the blow fall on me!" There are greater and better things in us all, than the world takes account of, or than we take note of; if we would but find them out.

Source: It's time to punish Britain's five million vaccine refuseniks: They put us all at risk of more restrictions, says ANDREW NEIL. So why shouldn't we curb some of their freedoms? https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-10294225/Its-time-punish-Britains-five-million-vaccine-refuseniks-says-ANDREW-NEIL.html, as quoted in The Daily Mail

Source: River Marked

Source: The Story of a New Name