Do not confuse your vested interests with ethics. Do not identify the enemies of your privilege with the enemies of humanity.
Max LernerRead
The problem of freedom in America is that of maintaining a competition of ideas, and you do not achieve that by silencing one brand of idea.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Freedom involves diverse ideas, and silencing any of them undermines true competition in thought.
Max Lerner's quote emphasizes the importance of a pluralistic discourse in a free society. It suggests that genuine freedom is not merely the absence of restrictions but requires an active engagement with a variety of thoughts and beliefs. Silencing specific ideas diminishes the quality of discourse and hinders the ability of society to navigate complex issues through competition and dialogue among differing perspectives.
Themes
FreedomIdeasCompetitionSilencingDialogue
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a debate about free speech on college campuses.
More from Max Lerner
All quotes →The best thing about lying in bed late is that you learn to distinguish between first things and trivia, for whatever presses on you has to prove its importance before it makes you move.
Max LernerRead
Despite the success cult, men are most deeply moved not by the reaching of the goal but by the grandness of the effort involved in getting there - or failing to get there.
Max LernerRead
You may call for peace as loudly as you wish, but where there is no brotherhood there can in the end be no peace.
Max LernerRead
When evil acts in the world it always manages to find instruments who believe that what they do is not evil but honorable.
Max LernerRead
Of the many things we have done to democracy in the past, the worst has been the indignity of taking it for granted.
Max LernerRead
Similar quotes
God Most High has said, "Is the reward of virtue aught save virtue?" . . . Know, O man, that the covenant of servanthood is incumbent upon you, and that the covenant of Lordship is incumbent upon His magnanimity, as He Most High has said, ". . . and fulfill your covenant, I shall fulfill My covenant."
Ibn Ata AllahRead
So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name. The problem’s name is God.
Salman RushdieRead
Those oft are stratagems which errors seem Nor is it Homer nods, but we that dream.
Alexander PopeRead
Human kind cannot bear much reality.
T. S. EliotRead
Religion, you know, enters very deep; in reality it is the deepest impression I have in speaking to people, that they are or that they are not of my religion.
Gerard Manley HopkinsRead
Our aim is to achieve a socialist system of society, which, by eliminating the division of mankind into classes, by eliminating all exploitation of man by man and nation by nation, will inevitably eliminate the very possibility of war.
Vladimir LeninRead