Daily Inspiration Quote by Corliss Lamont

Lamont’s line is a quiet grenade tossed into the two loudest rooms of modern moral debate: religious commandment and mechanistic determinism. “I believe firmly” plants a flag, but the sentence quickly pivots from personal conviction to a public argument about human dignity. He isn’t merely praising choice; he’s insisting on “prerogative” - a word that sounds like a legal right, something you’re owed, not something you’re granted by God, the state, or your neurons. Ethical life, for Lamont, can’t be outsourced.

The phrasing “true freedom of choice” does double duty. It’s a philosophical claim (there really is agency, not just the feeling of it) and a moral strategy (without agency, blame and praise become theater). Lamont, a major American humanist, wrote in a century obsessed with forces that shrink the self: Freudian drives, behaviorist conditioning, totalitarian political systems, and later the seductive authority of “science says” explanations for everything from crime to compassion. Against that backdrop, “ethical decisions” becomes the last redoubt where the person remains a person.

The subtext is also anti-authoritarian. If ethics depends on free choice, then morality can’t be reduced to obedience. It has to be practiced - argued over, revised, lived with consequences. Lamont is defending a secular moral universe where meaning is built in real time, by fallible individuals, not handed down. His intent isn’t to deny constraints; it’s to refuse the alibi that constraints write our morals for us.