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.
I can never drive my car over a bridge without thinking of suicide. I can never look at a lake or an ocean without thinking of suicide.
Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.
Christianity has been successfully attacked and marginalized… because those who professed belief were unable to defend the faith from attack, even though its attackers’ arguments were deeply flawed.
That's all that counts. People being sorry. Makes you feel better; gives you a sense of dignity, and that's all that's important; a sense of dignity. And it doesn't matter if you don't care or not, either. You got to have a sense of dignity, even if you don't care, 'cause, if you don't have that, civilization's doomed.
I'm an Afro-realist. I take what comes, and I do my best to affect what is unacceptable in society.
Real hunger is when one man regards another man as something to eat.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.