Progress without the reasoned freedom to think and act is regression to slavery.
Interpretation
True progress requires the freedom to think and act autonomously; otherwise, it leads to stagnation.
In this quote, Richard John Neuhaus emphasizes the importance of individual freedom as a prerequisite for genuine progress. He suggests that when people are not allowed the liberty to think critically and make their own choices, any advancement made is ultimately meaningless and could revert to a state akin to oppression or slavery, where individuals lack personal agency.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of intellectual freedom in education.
Optimism is a matter optics, of seeing what you want to see and not seeing what you don't want to see. Hope, on the other hand, is a Christian virtue. It is the unblinking acknowledgment of all that militates against hope, and the unrelenting refusal to despair. We have not the right to despair, and, finally, we have not the reason to despair
Respect for the dignity of others includes treating them as rational creatures capable of being persuadad by rational argument, even in the face of frequent evidence to the contrary.
We shall not weary, we shall not rest, as we stand guard at the entrance gates and the exit gates of life, and at every step along way of life, bearing witness in word and deed to the dignity of the human person-of every human person.
If the cause of poverty is marginalization, the cure is inclusion.
Western liberal humanism is not something that comes naturally to us: like an appreciation of art or poetry, it has to be cultivated. Humanism is itself a religion without God-not all religions, of course, are theistic. Our ethical secular ideal has it's own disciplines of mind and heart and gives people the means of finding faith in the ultimate meaning of human life that were once provided by the more conventional religions.
Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past.
Silence is the sea, and speech is like the river. The sea is seeking you: don't seek the river. Don't turn your head away from the signs offered by the sea.
Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion go hand in hand.
We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.
When air conditioning, escalators, and advertising appeared, shopping expanded its scale, but also limited its spontaneity. And it became much more predictable, almost scientific. What had once been the most surprising became the most manipulated.
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