. . . there, strung out under the cornice of the building, was the motto, which he had never noticed before, of the Federal Communications Agency:
PLANNED FREEDOM IS
THE ROAD TO LASTING PROGRESS.So simple, so direct, and yet, when you thought about it, almost impossible to understand.
Thomas M. Disch, “The Man Who Had No Idea,” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (October 1978).
Better to make haste slowly than not at all.
Leigh Brackett’s character Amnir, referencing the ancient motto “Festina lente” (hasten slowly) in The Ginger Star (1974). “Festina Lente” has been the motto of the Barons Dunsany in Ireland, and features on the family’s coat of arms.
All knowledge is sacred, but it should not be secret.
Susan Cooper, Over Sea, Under Stone (1965).
None has more contempt for what it is to be a man than they who make it their profession to lead the crowd.
Søren Kierkegaard, in Walter Kaufmann, ed., Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, p. 96.
He was born to be a senator. He never said anything important, and he always said it sonorously.
Sinclair Lewis on the protagonist of Elmer Gantry (1927).
What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude: the aims of friendship, religion, science, and art.
George Santayana, The Life of Reason; or, The Phases of Human Progress, Volume II: Reason in Society (1905), Chapter V, “Democracy.”
It has not yet been recorded that any human being has gained a very large or permanent contentment from meditation upon the fact that he is better off than others.
Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (1920).
When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.
George Santayana, The Life of Reason; or, The Phases of Human Progress, Volume II: Reason in Society (1905), Chapter VII, “Free Society.”
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand, and a race of men, perhaps as numerous as all Europe contains, are to receive their portion of freedom from the events of a few months. The reflection is awful, and in this point of view, how trifling, how ridiculous, do the little paltry cavilings of a few weak or interested men appear, when weighed against the business of a world.”
from “Common Sense” by Thomas Paine
We will freedom for freedom’s sake, in and through particular circumstances. And in thus willing freedom, we discover that it depends entirely upon the freedom of others and that the freedom of others depends upon our own. Obviously, freedom as the definition of a man does not depend upon others, but as soon as there is a commitment, I am obliged to will the liberty of others at the same time as my own. I cannot make liberty my aim unless I make that of others equally my aim.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946).