Leadership Quote by S. I. Hayakawa

The line borrows the cadence of a comforting proverb, then flips its premise with a quietly radical claim: mortality is real, but it need not be singular. Coming from S. I. Hayakawa, a politician who built a public identity around language and meaning, the move is telling. He is not praising books as decor or self-improvement props; he is arguing that literacy is a form of expanded citizenship, a technology for multiplying experience without pretending we can escape consequence.

The intent is aspirational, but the subtext is sharp: if reading lets you live "as many kinds of lives as we wish", then the people who cannot read, or are discouraged from reading widely, are being denied lives. This is an argument about access disguised as uplift. It also positions imagination as a civic muscle. Democracies run on perspective-taking; propaganda thrives when people are trapped inside one story, one tribe, one script. Hayakawa’s phrasing makes pluralism feel less like a lecture and more like a personal privilege anyone can claim, provided the door is open.

Context matters. Hayakawa rose in an era when mass media was tightening its grip on attention and politics was learning to sell identity at scale. Against that, he offers reading as counter-programming: slower, harder to manipulate, and capable of making you intimate with people you would otherwise dismiss. The sentence works because it’s both generous and strategic: it flatters the reader’s agency ("as we wish") while smuggling in a political ethic - broaden your inner life, and you become harder to govern through fear.