Daily Inspiration Quote by Morris Raphael Cohen

Cohen’s liberalism isn’t the self-congratulatory “arc of history” kind; it’s liberalism with its safety rails removed. He frames life as “an adventure,” a word that smuggles in uncertainty and moral exposure: you don’t adventure because you’re sure you’ll win. You do it because the alternative is a cramped existence policed by certainty. The line is built to puncture two temptations at once: reactionary fear of change and progressive faith that change automatically equals improvement.

The most pointed clause is the refusal of guarantees: “no guarantee that the new will always be the good or the true.” That’s a jab at utopian politics and at any ideology that treats novelty as evidence. Cohen is insisting on fallibilism as a civic virtue. Liberalism, in this telling, is not a brand of optimism; it’s a discipline of coping with error without fleeing into authoritarian supervision. If you accept that new conditions will arrive faster than your moral playbook, you need institutions and habits that can revise, repair, and argue without breaking.

“Progress is a precarious achievement rather than inevitability” is the grown-up ending. It suggests that gains in rights, knowledge, and tolerance are contingent: they can stall, reverse, or curdle into dogma. Context matters here. Cohen lived through World War I, the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression, and the rise of fascism. For an early 20th-century philosopher watching “progress” become mass slaughter and propaganda, liberalism had to be redefined not as history’s default setting, but as a risky, continual act of maintenance.