
“The whole world and every human being in it is everybody's business.”
My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)
School and Fireside (1898) https://archive.org/stream/schoolfireside00maesrich#page/n9/mode/2up
Context: Every human being is a world in miniature. It has its own centre of observation, its own way of forming concepts and of arriving at conclusions, its own degree of sensibility, its own life's work to do, and its own destiny to reach. All these features may be encompassed by general conditions, governed by general laws, and subject to unforeseen influences and incidents, but within the sphere of their own activity, they constitute that great principle which we call individuality.
“The whole world and every human being in it is everybody's business.”
My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)
Journals VII 1A 363
1840s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1840s
Context: Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household. One keeps this anxiety at a distance by looking at the many round about who are related to him as kin and friends, but the anxiety is still there, nevertheless, and one hardly dares think of how he would feel if all this were taken away.
“The true Poet is all-knowing; he is an actual world in miniature.”
Novalis (1829)
“One man is equivalent to all Creation. One man is a World in miniature.”
Avot of Rabbi Natan (c. 700 – 900)
Misattributed
Introduction to Poems of Power 1918 edition
“Yours for the unshackled exercise of every faculty by every human being.”
Message to woman suffrage supporters (c. 1875)
1870s
As quoted in Marriage Today : Problems, Issues, and Alternatives (1977) by James E. De Burger, p. 444
Variant: I think Dostoevsky was right, that every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, this is me and the damned world can go to hell.
As quoted in The Wordsworth Dictionary of Quotations (1998) by Connie Robertson, p. 270
Context: Therapy isn't curing somebody of something; it is a means of helping a person explore himself, his life, his consciousness. My purpose as a therapist is to find out what it means to be human. Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, "This is me and the world be damned!" Leaders have always been the ones to stand against the society — Socrates, Christ, Freud, all the way down the line.
Source: A World Waiting to Be Born: Civility Rediscovered
“Give to every human being every right that you claim for yourself.”
"The Limitations of Toleration" (8 May 1888), in The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Vol VII
Source: The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child