Work as if you were in the early days of a better nation.

Gray later devised a more distinct variant of this, because he believed the "nation" version should be credited to Lee | Work as if you live in the early days of a better world. | As quoted in "Early Days of a Better Nation" by Harry Mcgrath, in Scottish Review of Books (28 March 2013)

on this epigraph appear in other books by Alasdair Gray; one of them, "Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation", is now engraved on a wall of the Scottish Parliament building. They are all loose paraphrases of a couplet from Dennis Lee's "Civil Elegies": And best of all is finding a place to be in the early days of a better civilization.