[Ads-l] "So much good in the worst of us" Quote

[Shapiro, Fred]

The Yale Book of Quotations includes the following poem under the name of Kansas Governor Edward W. Hoch:


There is so much good in the worst of us,

And so much bad in the best of us,

That it hardly becomes any of us

To talk about the rest of us.


The attribution to Hoch is dated 1907.  I have now found a very similar quotation in the Brown County World (Hiawatha, Kan.), 14 Aug. 1896, without attribution to any individual.  What I need to complete the story is to find the earliest attribution to Hoch, and I would welcome citations pushing such attributions back as early as they can be found before 1907.


Fred Shapiro

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