“We don’t do what we do for the glory or the fame or the credit; we do it for the quiet satisfaction of making the world a better place, saving the lives of innocents, and being better than you are.”

Holly looks at him blankly. Freddy says, “Jones…you’re still new here People suggest ways to improve the company every day. Their ideas go into the suggestion box in the cafeteria—where the cafeteria was, I mean—and they’re never heard from again, except during all-staff meetings when Senior Management picks out the most useless one and announces a cross-functional team to look into it. A year or two later, when everyone’s forgotten about it, we get an e-mail announcing the implementation of something that bears no resemblance to the initial idea and usually has the opposite effect, and in the annual reports this is used as evidence that the company listens and reacts to its workers. That’s what happens when you try to make Zephyr a better place to work.”
Q4/2: November, pp. 208-209
Company (2006)

Tim Teeman, "The importance of being Childish", http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,22876-2475809.html The Times, 2006-12-02
Childish's name is the most prominent in Tracey Emin's Everyone I have Ever Slept With 1963–1995, appliquéd names in a tent (destroyed in the Momart warehouse fire).

2009, Nobel Prize acceptance speech (December 2009)
Context: We do not have to think that human nature is perfect for us to still believe that the human condition can be perfected. We do not have to live in an idealized world to still reach for those ideals that will make it a better place. The non-violence practiced by men like Gandhi and King may not have been practical or possible in every circumstance, but the love that they preached — their fundamental faith in human progress — that must always be the North Star that guides us on our journey.
For if we lose that faith — if we dismiss it as silly or naïve; if we divorce it from the decisions that we make on issues of war and peace — then we lose what's best about humanity. We lose our sense of possibility. We lose our moral compass.
Like generations have before us, we must reject that future. As Dr. King said at this occasion so many years ago, "I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the 'isness' of man's present condition makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal 'oughtness' that forever confronts him."
Let us reach for the world that ought to be — that spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls.

Source: Les Misérables

Rules 2 Rule

Remarks (overheard by reporters) in July 1969 after meeting with a group of black civil rights workers, who protested the Administration's action on the Voting Rights Act of 1965
reported in :
The Washington Post, "Watch What We Do," editorial (July 7, 1969), p. A22.
Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations, James H. Billington, Library of Congress, 2010, Courier Corporation, Google Books https://books.google.com/books?id=91IFAYFhtOMC&pg=PA4&lpg=PA4&dq=Mitchell,
Watch What We Do, William Safire, 14 November 1988, The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/14/opinion/essay-watch-what-we-do.html,
Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party's Buried Past, Bruce, Bartlett, 8 January 2008, Palgrave Macmillan, Google Books https://books.google.com/books?id=POhHuoGILNYC&pg=PA253&lpg=PA253&dq=Watch-What-We-Do,
We Have No Leaders: African Americans in the Post-Civil Rights Era, Robert Charles, Smith, 22 July 1996, SUNY Press, Google Books https://books.google.com/books?id=eNrMbvyHhrIC&pg=PA267&lpg=PA267&dq=Watch-What-We-Do,
The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate, James, Rosen, 20 May 2008, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Google Books https://books.google.com/books?id=fHIGQTGemnAC&pg=PA136&lpg=PA136&dq=watch-what-we-do,
The Oxford Dictionary of American Quotations, Rawson, Hugh; Miner, Margaret., 2006, Oxford University Press, USA, Google Books https://books.google.com/books?id=whg05Z4Nwo0C&pg=PA4&lpg=PA4&dq=You-will-be-better-advised,

Source: Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story (1990), p. 215

"The Path of the Law," Address to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts at the dedication of the new hall of the Boston University School of Law (8 January 1897), published in Harvard Law Review, Vol. 10 (25 March 1897).
1890s