“Development that ignores social fractures deepens them. Infrastructure may rise, but trust collapses when people feel excluded. Progress must be measured by inclusion, not spectacle.”

2013, Eulogy of Nelson Mandela (December 2013)

Source: Democracy Realizedː The Progressive Alternative (1998), p. 249

In "My Country 'tis of Thee", ADAM International Review, No. 299 (1962)
Context: I am beginning to have a healthy dread of possessions, be it of a country, a house, a being or even an idea. If we are bothered by possessions we cannot really live either from without or from within; we are the possession of our possessions. All wars and most loves come from the possessive instinct. Why grab possessions like thieves, or divide them like socialists when you can ignore them like wise men: that you may belong to everything and everything be yours inclusive of yourself.
Could we, and we can, have the vital necessities for all, we should do away with this cry of class and begin to differentiate between individuals.
Individual superiority can alone feed the soul and give back through some materialisation of itself this individualised wealth of being.

2009, Speech: The Socio-Economic Peace Program of Senator Francis Escudero

Source: Común Magazine.
https://revistacomun.com/blog/cuando-el-mundial-dejo-de-representar-al-mundo/

Nobel lecture (1978)

The Principles of Success in Literature (1865)
Context: Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress. It deepens our natural sensibilities, and strengthens by exercise our intellectual capacities. It stores up the accumulated experience of the race, connecting Past and Present into a conscious unity; and with this store it feeds successive generations, to be fed in turn by them. As its importance emerges into more general recognition, it necessarily draws after it a larger crowd of servitors, filling noble minds with a noble ambition.

Tuesdays with Morrie (1997)