Science Quote by Georg C. Lichtenberg

A scientist insisting on the sovereignty of self-definition is a neat Lichtenbergian twist: the man who spent his life measuring the world turns around and warns you that the hardest datum to police is a person. The line sounds like a principled defense of freedom, but its real muscle is in the phrase "in the last resort". He’s not claiming we’re free all the time; he’s claiming that when every social argument has been made, something irreducible remains. Call it conscience, interiority, the private stubbornness that survives institutions.

"His right to be what he believes himself to be" reads like early modern psychological realism. Identity here isn’t granted by church, class, or state; it’s authored from the inside, even if that authorship is messy or mistaken. Lichtenberg was famously skeptical about human rationality and self-knowledge, which adds an acidic undertone: people may be deluded about who they are, but coercion still isn’t the cure. Contesting someone’s self-concept is less a route to truth than a grab for power.

Context matters: late Enlightenment Europe was busy categorizing human beings - by rank, creed, gender, “character” - with the confidence of systems-builders. Lichtenberg, a physicist with a satirist’s eye, understood how quickly classification becomes control. The sentence is built like a moral veto: whatever your taxonomy, you don’t get final jurisdiction over another person’s inner claim. In an age that loved authority dressed up as reason, he’s staking out a small, radical boundary: the self as the last ungovernable territory.