The Stoics say we build a life, create change, action by action, step by step. “No one can stop you from that,” Marcus Aurelius wrote in Meditations. There’s a fountain of goodness there, inside us, in the world, Marcus wrote. We must make sure it keeps bubbling up. No one can make you give up on your cause—that’s the one thing you control. They can shower you with curses. They can erect countless obstacles. They can attack you with knives and fists (as happened to people like John Doar and James Meredith). They can bury you in paperwork. They can slow-walk you into near insanity. But the
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