“A great many men are mad, and no one knows it. They do not know it themselves”

Flowers for Algernon (1966)

1960s, State of the Union Address (1966)

Great Things
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XI - Cash and Credit

1860s, Our Composite Nationality (1869)
Context: The theory that each race of men has some special faculty, some peculiar gift or quality of mind or heart, needed to the perfection and happiness of the whole is a broad and beneficent theory, and, besides its beneficence, has, in its support, the voice of experience. Nobody doubts this theory when applied to animals or plants, and no one can show that it is not equally true when applied to races. All great qualities are never found in any one man or in any one race. The whole of humanity, like the whole of everything else, is ever greater than a part. Men only know themselves by knowing others, and contact is essential to this knowledge. In one race we perceive the predominance of imagination; in another, like the Chinese, we remark its almost total absence. In one people we have the reasoning faculty; in another the genius for music; in another exists courage, in another great physical vigor, and so on through the whole list of human qualities. All are needed to temper, modify, round and complete the whole man and the whole nation.

The Fourfold Treasure (1871) No. 991 http://www.spurgeon.org/sermons/0991.htm

Source: Generation of Vipers (1942), p. 104
Context: Few men, indeed, are so mad that they do not know when they are doing wrong. But so avid is their pursuit of goods that wrongdoing has become an element of all they do. To protest that fact is idle. Our politics, our business — little and big, our professions, our labor, are smitten in every facet with a corruption occasioned by reckless determination to make not just a reasonable profit but all the profit that can be wrung from every enterprise. Our commonest man, emulating his superiors, forges ahead with a brick on the safety valve of his conscience. Think over your morning paper in that light.

Tales of Three Hemispheres http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/1/1/4/4/11440/11440-8.txt, A Shop In Go-By Street

Source: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

Trying to Know
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part X - The Position of a HomoUnius Libri