Promoting Topics

Every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the publick interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it.... He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.
—Adam Smith (1723–1790)

All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind; and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and say, the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior.
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)

The President has the authority to do a great deal in promoting a reform of the civil service. But the great mass of evils to be dealt with require means, time agents, the work of intelligent and able officers, none of which the President has unless they are furnished by Congress. As at present situated, the great evil is congressional patronage. This I have resisted as a usurpation of executive prerogatives, until now few Congressmen assert openly their claim to it. But they withhold from the Executive the means to get information from other sources than through Congressmen.
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)