Leadership Quote by S. I. Hayakawa

Hayakawa’s line flatters the reader, but it isn’t just a pat on the head for the bookish. It’s a political claim about citizenship disguised as a humane observation: reading isn’t a hobby, it’s a form of experience accumulation that changes what you can recognize, tolerate, and imagine. “In a very real sense” signals he knows he’s making an audacious comparison. He preemptively anchors it in pragmatism, not poetry, as if to say: I’m not romanticizing novels; I’m talking about usable perception.

The subtext is a quiet indictment of refusal. “Cannot or will not” collapses incapacity and choice into one moral category, implying that illiteracy, disinterest, and anti-intellectual posturing all produce the same civic outcome: a narrower life. That’s a politician’s move, drawing a line between the culturally equipped and the willfully closed off, then suggesting the stakes are existential.

Context matters: Hayakawa, trained in semantics, spent his career worrying about how language shapes public reality. For him, “good literature” isn’t decorative. It’s an instrument for decoding motives, propaganda, self-deception - the messy human factors that turn policy into lived consequences. The phrase “lived more” also sidesteps GDP-style measures of success. It argues that interior life counts as a public good.

What makes it work is its provocative compression: it turns reading into a moral multiplier. You don’t get extra years, you get extra lives - borrowed, rehearsed, compared. In a democracy, that kind of rehearsal can be the difference between empathy and easy cruelty.