The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.
Interpretation
Freedom enriches our understanding of life rather than just providing material wealth and power.
In this quote, Adam Gopnik suggests that the true essence of freedom lies not in the material advantages it offers but in the opportunity it provides to reflect on and appreciate existence. When people are free, they can take the time to explore the meaning of life, leading to deeper insights and a more fulfilled existence.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about the importance of personal liberties in a philosophy class.
The future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes, the basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on.
The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present. If we had been there listening, we still might not have been able to determine exactly what Stanton said. All we know for sure is that everyone was weeping, and the room was full.
Protein was the most valued ingredient 250 years ago: It was the rarest thing. Now the rarest thing we have is time: time to cook and time to eat.
Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.
We have to keep company with supposedly bad characters if we are to survive and not succumb to mental atrophy. People of good character, so called, are the ones who end up boring us to death.
Day after day I read Freud, thinking myself to be very enlightened and scientific when, as a matter of fact, I was about as scientific as an old woman secretly poring over books about occultism, trying to tell her own fortune, and learning how to dope out the future form the lines in the palm of her hand. I don't know if I ever got very close to needing a padded cell: but if I ever had gone crazy, I think psychoanalysis would have been the one thing chiefly responsible for it.
We all create the person we become by our choices as we go through life. In a real sense, by the time we are adults, we are the sum total of the choices we have made.
Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference.
The main achievement of economics is that it has provided a theory of peaceful human cooperation. This is why the harbingers of violent conflict have branded it as a dismal science and why this age of wars, civil wars, and destruction has no use for it.
Are your convictions so fragile that mine cannot stand in opposition to them? Is your God so illusory that the presence of my Devil reveals his insufficiency?
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