“I have learned that success in business, and perhaps in most aspects of life, requires both self-discipline and objectively imposed discipline from outside.”

Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1904/questions-rsd/ch01.htm (1904) <br class="br">Context: The self-discipline of the Social Democracy is not merely the replacement of the authority of bourgeois rulers with the authority of a socialist central committee. The working class will acquire the sense of the new discipline, the freely assumed self-discipline of the Social Democracy, not as a result of the discipline imposed on it by the capitalist state, but by extirpating, to the last root, its old habits of obedience and servility.

“Commerce and Culture,” p. 285.
Giants and Dwarfs (1990)

Relating Religion (2004), p. 179.

Source: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

1961, Address before the American Society of Newspaper Editors
Context: If the self-discipline of the free cannot match the iron discipline of the mailed fist-in economic, political, scientific and all the other kinds of struggles as well as the military-then the peril to freedom will continue to rise.