The question

What do you need to believe in order to get through the day?

Originally asked

Vox, to writers and thinkers, 9 Questions, 2017

Vox used this exact prompt throughout its named 9 Questions series on intellectual habits.

You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.

Albie Sachs

Anti-apartheid lawyer; Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa

Recorded said elsewhere, not written here
The one is, to me, the question of conscience is number one. It comes before food. You can survive on almost anything, but your dignity depends on your conscience.

Interview, Cape Town, South Africa, American Academy of Achievement, 3 July 2009 source ↗

Others on this question

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Bill Clinton 42nd President of the United States, 1993–2001
Yeah, there were a lot of brave people who stood up. Then, you know, it cost Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers and the three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and Viola Liuzza and a lot of the others their lives, but they were on the right side of history, and they believed if they made this sacrifice that it would work out. And whenever I get discouraged about everything they stood against rising up again, I realize there just are no public, or permanent, victories. You have to keep fighting for freedom.
Recorded Academy of Achievement interview source ↗
Jacqueline Novogratz Founder and chief executive of Acumen
A new generation that is determined to use the tools of capitalism without being controlled by it. To solve big problems of poverty and of the environment. We now have more tools, skills, understanding, and awareness than ever in history—so solving those problems is within our reach.
Recorded Acumen America, 22 May 2024 source ↗
Tony Judt Historian and essayist
During the day I can at least request a scratch, an adjustment, a drink, or simply a gratuitous re-placement of my limbs—since enforced stillness for hours on end is not only physically uncomfortable but psychologically close to intolerable. It is not as though you lose the desire to stretch, to bend, to stand or lie or run or even exercise. But when the urge comes over you there is nothing—nothing—that you can do except seek some tiny substitute or else find a way to suppress the thought and the accompanying muscle memory.
Recorded The New York Review of Books, 14 January 2010 issue, 14 January 2010 source ↗
Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard Developmental biologist; Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine, 1995
I sing yes sure and I garden, I have a large garden and I really recreate myself by doing gardening and thinking about something else so that when your mind gets free from all the burden of the daily troubles and then you can start putting something fresh in, you know.
Recorded Marika Griehsel, Interview at the 53rd Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, 30 June–4 July 2003, Nobel Prize Outreach, 1 July 2003 source ↗

More from Albie Sachs

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Question Which book changed the way you think, and what did it change? Taste & recommendation
I’d been introduced to Freud through all this because I couldn’t understand why is it so difficult to be brave. There was something inside me that wanted to collaborate all the time with the people who wanted to destroy me, and I was searching for it, and I found there was a thing called the unconscious that everybody has. And you’ve got to be in touch with the unconscious to understand a lot of your behavior. And I read through volume after volume after volume of the collected works of Sigmund Freud.
Recorded Academy of Achievement recorded interview, American Academy of Achievement, 3 July 2009 source ↗
Question What does love feel like? Relationships
Love, in so many different manifestations... normally a calm feeling, an intense and rich feeling that is based on a very beautiful emotion of connection with people, and space on earth, and in the world. Love, and respect, and admiration, and appreciation, these things flow easily into eachother.
Recorded Koyo Kouoh, Koyo and Albie in conversation, The Albie Collection, 25 July 2024 source ↗

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Bill Clinton, Leon Panetta, Rosa Parks, Desmond Tutu, Hiroshi Mikitani, Alan Cumming

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