"We must cultivate our garden"

I have finished reading Voltaire's Candide, the fast-paced chronicle of all the outrages that befall a simpleton and his beloved, friends and relatives in "the best of all possible worlds". The sad thing about the horrors that befall the characters, particularly the women, is that they still recur four centuries after the time this tale was written. One only has to look at the pages of the Economist, that sober and sensible journal. But even Dr Pangloss, who maintained that the world was the best of all possible worlds, no longer believed it by the end of the tale. In the end, they come to the conclusion that "we must cultivate our garden."