On September 16, 1867, the physician and philosopher Gabino Barreda gave his Oración cívica (Civic Oration). He closed it with a motto for the country: “libertad, orden y progreso” (liberty, order and progress), with “el orden como base y el progreso como fin” (order as the base and progress as the goal). Barreda became the first director of the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria.
Under Porfirio Díaz, the repressions of his government were justified with positivism, which proposed “Orden y progreso”. A motto often attributed to Díaz himself is “Poca política y mucha administración” (Little politics and much administration).