The Shopping Cart Theory

“The shopping cart is the ultimate litmus test for whether a person is capable of self-governing. 

    "To return the shopping cart is an easy, convenient task and one which we all recognise as the correct, appropriate thing to do. To return the shopping cart is objectively right. There are no situations other than dire emergencies in which a person is not able to return their cart. 

    "Simultaneously, it is not illegal to abandon your shopping cart. Therefore the shopping cart presents itself as the apex example of whether a person will do what is right without being forced to do it. No one will punish you for not returning the shopping cart, no one will fine you or kill you for not returning the shopping cart, you gain nothing by returning the shopping cart. You must return the shopping cart out of the goodness of your own heart. You must return the shopping cart because it is the right thing to do.

    "Because it is correct. 

    "A person who is unable to do this is no better than an animal, an absolute savage who can only be made to do what is right by threatening them a law and the force that stands behind it. 

    "The Shopping Cart is what determines whether a person is a good or bad member of society.”

~ anon. but widely attrib. to Glenn Danzig

"The True Gentleman is the man whose conduct proceeds from goodwill and an acute sense of propriety, and whose self-control is equal to all emergencies; who does not make the poor man conscious of his poverty, the obscure man of his obscurity, or any man of his inferiority or deformity; who is himself humbled if necessity compels him to humble another; who does not flatter wealth, cringe before power, or boast of his own possessions or achievements; who speaks with frankness but always with sincerity and sympathy; whose deed follows his word; who thinks of the rights and feelings of others, rather than his own; who appears well in any company, and a man with whom honour is sacred and virtue safe."

~ John Walter Wayland (1872-1962), American historian and educator who submitted 'A True Gentleman' to The Baltimore Sun in 1899 as part of a competition for the best definition of a true gentleman. His was crowned the winner.