“One hardly saves a world without ruling it.”

Source: Civil Government : Its Origin, Mission, and Destiny (1889), p. 73
Context: Human government, the embodied effort of man to rule the world without God, ruled over by "the prince of this world," the devil. Its mission is to execute wrath and vengeance here on earth. Human government bears the same relation to hell as the church bears to heaven.

Source: Schindler's List

Vainglory, cited from The Complete Ronald Firbank (London: Duckworth, 1961) p. 149.

Part II (p. 72)
Earth (1990)

Some historians have opined that the assassination quip was in response to an assassination threat Lincoln had been notified about earlier.
1860s, Speech in Independence Hall (1861)

Declaration of Rebellion, Extinction Rebellion, Parliament Square, London, 31 October 2018.
Cited in No One is Too Small to Make a Difference, Penguin Books, 2019, page 12 (ISBN 9780141991740).
2018, "Almost Everything is Black and White" (October 2018)

Nous ne trouvons guère de gens de bon sens, que ceux qui sont de notre avis.
Maxim 347. Compare: "'That was excellently observed,' say I when I read a passage in another where his opinion agrees with mine. When we differ, then I pronounce him to be mistaken." Jonathan Swift, Thoughts on Various Subjects.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)

Variant: You begin saving the world by saving one person at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.
Source: Women