“Drunkards and sensualists have become heroes and saints; but sluggards have never risen to the significance and worth of human beings. Sloth enfeebles the root of life, and degrades more surely, if less swiftly, than the sins of passion.”

Source: The Last Olympian

Source: Intercourse (1987), Chapter 7

Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. III : A Controversy; Gilbert to Helen

On Revolutionary Medicine (1960)
Variant: The life of a single human being is worth a million times more than all the property of the richest man on the earth.

Source: Pale Fire

Source: Charles Dickens (1906), Ch. 8 "The Time of Transition"

[Thus Spake the Holy Mother, 72-73]

Non-Progress: The soul in tha machine (p. 187)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

The Osho Upanishad
Context: I do not ordinarily make prophecies, but about this I am absolutely prophetic: the coming hundred years are going to be more and more irrational, and more and more mystical. The second thing: After a hundred years people will be perfectly able to understand why I was misunderstood — because I am the beginning of the mystical, the irrational. I am a discontinuity with the past. The past cannot understand me; only the future will understand. The past can only condemn me. It cannot understand me, it cannot answer me, it cannot argue with me; it can only condemn me. Only the future … as man becomes more and more available to the mysterious, to the meaningless yet significant … After a hundred years they will understand. Because the more man becomes aware of the mysterious side of life, the less he is political; the less he is a Hindu, a Mohammedan, a Christian; the less is the possibility for his being a fanatic. A man in tune with the mysterious is humble, loving, caring, accepting the uniqueness of everybody. He is rejoicing in the freedom of each individual, because only with freedom can this garden of humanity be a rich place.