Daily Inspiration Quote by James Larkin

Liberty of conscience is doing double duty here: it sounds like a personal right, but Larkin frames it as a collective discipline. The line starts with an assertion of ownership - "claiming for ourselves" - then pivots into an obligation: "we shall see to it". That shift matters. It refuses the cozy version of freedom as private preference and recasts it as something you enforce socially, even politically, so it can't be hoarded by the loudest church, the richest class, or the state.

The specific intent is coalition-building. In early 20th-century Ireland, where national identity, Catholic power, and class conflict frequently braided together, "liberty to worship" could easily become code for one group's dominance. Larkin, a labor organizer with a taste for mass mobilization, sidesteps sectarian traps by making religious freedom a test of democratic seriousness. If your liberty depends on your neighbor's silence, it isn't liberty; it's privilege with better branding.

The subtext is a warning to both sides of power: to clerical authority that wants to police thought, and to secular radicals tempted to treat faith as backwardness. Larkin doesn't ask anyone to dilute belief. He asks them to accept a more threatening idea: equal standing for people whose consciences you think are wrong.

Rhetorically, the sentence works because it moves from the intimate (conscience) to the institutional (rights for "every other individual") without changing moral temperature. It turns tolerance from passive endurance into an active civic promise.