“All new states are invested, more or less, by a class of noisy, second-rate men who are always in favor of rash and extreme measures, but Texas was absolutely overrun by such men.”

Day One
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632)
Context: It always seems to me extreme rashness on the part of some when they want to make human abilities the measure of what nature can do. On the contrary, there is not a single effect in nature, even the least that exists, such that the most ingenious theorists can arrive at a complete understanding of it. This vain presumption of understanding everything can have no other basis than never understanding anything. For anyone who had experienced just once the perfect understanding of one single thing, and had truly tasted how knowledge is accomplished, would recognize that of the infinity of other truths he understands nothing.

Vol. 1, ch. 10, p. 365
A History of the United States (1834-74)

"The Grizzly and the Gadgets", The New Yorker (date unknown); Further Fables for Our Time (1956); This statement is derived from one of Henry David Thoreau: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."
From Fables for Our Time and Further Fables for Our Time

Act II.
The Good-Natured Man (1768)

Diary (23 January 1881)
Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1922 - 1926)

Pg 27
The Way of Men (2012)

Blood Meridian (1985)

The Chinese Novel (1938)
Context: The street is noisy and the men and women are not perfect in the technique of their expression as the statues are. They are ugly and imperfect, incomplete even as human beings, and where they come from and where they go cannot be known. But they are people and therefore infinitely to be preferred to those who stand upon the pedestals of art.

1.2, Essential Works of Lenin (1966)
The State and Revolution (1917)