Not all the evils of our condition are such as we can justly blame others for; and, I repeat, many of them are such as no changes of institutions can quickly remedy. To discern between the evils that energy can remove and the evils that patience must bear, makes the difference between manliness and childishness, between good sense and folly.
Mary Ann Evans writing as George Eliot, in The Essays of George Eliot (1883), “Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt” (January 1868) — signed by the hero of her 1866 social novel Felix Holt, The Radical.
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George Eliot
