“I approve of all you say, gentlemen. The fleet's needs are many and urgent. One, however, must take precedence. This item the men need before all, and we must get it for them without fail and without deferral. We must get the men a victory.”

Journal entry, Gilleleie (1 August 1835) Journals 1A; this is considered to be one of the earliest statements of existentialist thought.
Variant translation: My focus should be on what I do in life, not knowing everything, excluding knowledge on what you do. The is key to find a purpose, whatever it truly is that God wills me to do; it's crucial to find a truth which is true to me, to find the idea which I am willing to live and die for.
Later variant: What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so far as a certain knowledge must precede every action. The thing is to understand myself, to see what God really wishes me to do: the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die. … I certainly do not deny that I still recognize an imperative of knowledge and that through it one can work upon men, but it must be taken up into my life, and that is what I now recognize as the most important thing.
Later expression of such thoughts in a letter to Peter Wilhelm Lund (31 August 1835)
Variant translation: I must find a truth that is true for me.
1830s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1830s
Context: What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find a purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.

1850s, West India Emancipation (1857)
Context: Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. [... ] Men might not get all they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.

Misquoting Ernst Rudin, "Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need", Birth Control Review, April 1933. http://lifedynamics.com/app/uploads/2015/09/1933-04-April.pdf
Actual quote by Rudin: "Not only is it our task to prevent the multiplication of bad stocks, it is also to preserve the well-endowed stocks and to increase the birth-rate of the sound average population."
Misattributed

Ce besoin de l’immatériel est le plus vivace de tous. Il faut du pain; mais avant le pain, il faut l’idéal.
" Les fleurs http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Proses_philosophiques_-_Les_Fleurs#IV," (ca. 1860 - 1865), from Oeuvres complètes (1909); published in English as The Memoirs of Victor Hugo, trans. John W. Harding (1899), Chapter VI: Love in Prison, part II

Asked about his consistent budget cuts to the CDC, the NIH, and the WHO.

White House press conference, , quoted in * 2020-02-28

As the World Reaches for Face Masks, Trump Buries His Head in the Sand

Jonathan Chait

New York Magazine

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/trump-coronavirus-response.html
2020s, 2020, February

John Gookin, NOLS Wilderness Wisdom: Quotes for Inspirational Exploration (2003), ISBN 0811726460, p. 45.
Attributed

2010s, Hard Truths: Law Enforcement (2015)

The Drowned and the Saved (1986)

Source: — Chetan Bhagat (@chetan_bhagat) 2021 at Twitter https://twitter.com/chetan_bhagat/status/1417001960377503746