necessities quotes

It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed† Great necessities call out great virtues.

- Abigail Adams
  Letter to  John Quincy Adams,19  Jan.

Science is triumphant with far-ranging success, but its triumph is somehow clouded by growing difficulties in providing for the simple necessities of human life on earth.

- Barry Commoner
  Science and Survival.

In the affluent society, no useful distinction can be made between luxuries and necessities.

-John Kenneth Galbraith
  The Affluent Society.

The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.

- Nathaniel Hawthorne
  The Scarlet Letter, ch.1.