“A man's value to the community depends primarily on how far his feelings, thoughts, and actions are directed towards promoting the good of his fellows.”
"Einstein's Reply to Criticisms" (1949), The World As I See It (1949)
Context: A man's value to the community depends primarily on how far his feelings, thoughts, and actions are directed towards promoting the good of his fellows. We call him good or bad according to how he stands in this matter. It looks at first sight as if our estimate of a man depended entirely on his social qualities.
And yet such an attitude would be wrong. It is clear that all the valuable things, material, spiritual, and moral, which we receive from society can be traced back through countless generations to certain creative individuals. The use of fire, the cultivation of edible plants, the steam engine — each was discovered by one man.
Only the individual can think, and thereby create new values for society — nay, even set up new moral standards to which the life of the community conforms. Without creative, independently thinking and judging personalities the upward development of society is as unthinkable as the development of the individual personality without the nourishing soil of the community.
The health of society thus depends quite as much on the independence of the individuals composing it as on their close political cohesion.
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Albert Einstein 702
German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativi… 1879–1955Related quotes
“The institutional leader, then, is primarily an expert in the promotion and protection of values.”
Source: Leadership in Administration: A Sociological Interpretation, 1957, p. 28
"Society and Civilization" in the American Review (July 1845)
Context: The duties of man consist in alternate action and meditation, mutually aiding and relieving each other; and both, directed with undeviating aim, to the progressive improvement of himself and his fellow creatures. Heaven has given him in charge, to promote the happiness and well-being of himself, his wife, his children, his kindred, his neighbors, his fellow citizens, his country, and his kind; and the great problem of legislation is, so to organize the civil government of a community, that this gradation of duties, may be made to harmonize in all its parts — that in the operation of human institutions upon social action, self-love and social may be made the same.
Letter to Harold Adam Innis (14 March 1951), published in Essential McLuhan (1995), edited by Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, p. 73
1950s
Caxtoniana: Hints on Mental Culture (1862)
Il n'est si homme de bien, qu'il mette à l'examen des loix toutes ses actions et pensées, qui ne soit pendable dix fois en sa vie.
Book III, Ch. 9
Essais (1595), Book III
Variant: There is no man so good, who, were he to submit all his thoughts and actions to the laws, would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.
1910s, Address to the Knights of Columbus (1915)
Context: The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality, than with the other citizens of the American Republic. The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans; and there ought to be no room for them in this country. The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic. He has no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels his real heart allegiance, the better it will be for every good American. There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.
The Common Sense of Science (1951), on the influence of Isaac Newton.
“An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens.”
Section II, p. 6
Natural Law; or The Science of Justice (1882), Chapter I. The Science of Justice.