Daily Inspiration Quote by Margaret Anderson

“Self-preservation is the first responsibility” lands like a moral correction, especially coming from Margaret Anderson, the combustible editor who co-founded The Little Review and helped drag modernism into public view. Anderson wasn’t peddling wellness aphorisms. She was staking out a survival ethic for anyone trying to live and think freely inside institutions that punish dissent.

As an editor, her “responsibility” wasn’t abstract virtue; it was practical triage. The Little Review’s obscenity trial over Joyce’s Ulysses made clear that cultural gatekeeping isn’t just taste-making, it’s enforcement. When the state, courts, donors, and polite society align to throttle a publication, martyrdom becomes a seductive narrative. Anderson’s line refuses that romance. Keep yourself intact first, she implies, because only intact people can keep making trouble tomorrow.

The subtext is also gendered and modern. In a world that trained women to be agreeable, self-erasing custodians of everyone else’s comfort, “self-preservation” reads as a quietly radical reordering of priorities. It’s not selfishness; it’s an insistence on agency. Responsibility begins at the boundary of the self: your body, your mind, your ability to say no.

There’s a sharp editorial realism underneath: art needs infrastructure, and infrastructure needs the editor alive, solvent, and unbroken. Anderson’s intent is less inspirational than tactical. Preserve the instrument. The work can’t continue if the person carrying it is sacrificed to the idea of purity.