People From Vienna

"If nowhere else, in the relation between Church and State, "good fences make good neighbors.""

"If one starts with the assumption that, in the absence of specific Congressional authority, a fixed rule of law precludes contracting officers from providing in a Government contract terms reasonably calculated to assure its performance even though there be no money loss through a particular default, there is no problem. But answers are not obtained by putting the wrong question and thereby begging the real one."

"Decisions of this Court do not have equal intrinsic authority."

"It has not been unknown that judges persist in error to avoid giving the appearance of weakness and vacillation."

"The Procrustean bed is not a symbol of equality. It is no less inequality to have equality among unequals."

"In law also the emphasis makes the song."

"If one man can be allowed to determine for himself what is law, every man can. That means first chaos, then tyranny. Legal process is an essential part of the democratic process."

"It is not only under Nazi rule that police excesses are inimical to freedom. It is easy to make light of insistence on scrupulous regard for the safeguards of civil liberties when invoked on behalf of the unworthy. It is too easy. History bears testimony that by such disregard are the rights of liberty extinguished, heedlessly at first, then stealthily, and brazenly in the end."

"The course of decision in this Court has thus far jealously enforced the principle of a free society secured by the prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures. Its safeguards are not to be worn away by a process of devitalizing interpretation."

"Of compelling consideration is the fact that words acquire scope and function from the history of events which they summarize."

"It must never be forgotten, however, that the Bill of Rights was the child of the Enlightenment. Back of the guarantee of free speech lay faith in the power of an appeal to reason by all the peaceful means for gaining access to the mind. It was in order to avert force and explosions due to restrictions upon rational modes of communication that the guarantee of free speech was given a generous scope. But utterance in a context of violence can lose its significance as an appeal to reason and become part of an instrument of force. Such utterance was not meant to be sheltered by the Constitution."

"National unity is the basis of national security. To deny the legislature the right to select appropriate means for its attainment presents a totally different order of problem from that of the propriety of subordinating the possible ugliness of littered streets to the free expression opinion through handbills."

"It would be a narrow conception of jurisprudence to confine the notion of 'laws' to what is found written on the statute books, and to disregard the gloss which life has written upon it."

"To be effective, judicial administration must not be leaden-footed."

"The ultimate touchstone of constitutionality is the Constitution itself and not what we have said about it."

"In this Court dissents have gradually become majority opinions."

"The Amendment nullifies sophisticated as well as simple-minded modes of discrimination."

"In any event, mere speed is not a test of justice. Deliberate speed is. Deliberate speed takes time. But it is time well spent."

"After all, advocates, including advocates for States, are like managers of pugilistic and election contestants, in that they have a propensity for claiming everything."

"Is that which was deemed to be of so fundamental a nature as to be written into the Constitution to endure for all times to be the sport of shifting winds of doctrine?"

"One who belongs to the most vilified and persecuted minority in history is not likely to be insensible to the freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution... But as judges we are neither Jew nor Gentile, neither Catholic nor agnostic."

"The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards. And the effective administration of criminal justice hardly requires disregard of fair procedures imposed by law."

"A phrase begins life as a literary expression; its felicity leads to its lazy repetition; and repetition soon establishes it as a legal formula, undiscriminatingly used to express different and sometimes contradictory ideas."

"No court can make time stand still."

"The line must follow some direction of policy, whether rooted in logic or experience. Lines should not be drawn simply for the sake of drawing lines."

"Litigation is the pursuit of practical ends, not a game of chess."

"Why do comparisons of words and tone poems (poetry and music) never take into consideration that the word is a mere signifier, but that the sound, aside from being a signifier, is also an object?"

"Let the famous not denounce fame. Far from being empty and meaningless, it fills those it touches with divine power."

"I love the pride whose measure is its own eminence and not the insignificance of someone else."

"When mundane, lowly activities are at stake, too much insight is detrimental—far-sightedness errs in immediate concerns."

"I'd wish the government took honest people into consideration, it shows enough consideration for scoundrels."

"After fighting, scheming and murdering in pursuit of the secure tenure of absolute power, he found himself at last on a lonely pinnacle over an abyss, with no use for his power and security unattainable. His genius was such that he ended an epoch and began another - but one of unceasing war and misery, from which exhaustion produced an approach to order after two generations and peace at last under the Roman Empire. He himself never found peace. One is tempted to see him, in medieval terms, as the man who sold his soul to the Devil for power: the Devil kept his part of the bargain but ultimately claimed his own. But to the historian, prosaically such allegory, we must put it differently: to him, when he has done all the work - work that must be done, and done carefully - of analysing the play of faction and the system of government, Alexander illustrates with startling clarity the ultimate loneliness of supreme power."

"Philip II, at least from the time of his victory over Phocis, Athens, and their allies in 346, prepared to proclaim himself the champion of a United Greece against the barbarians."

"Could the search for ultimate truth really have revealed so hideous and visceral looking an object?"

"While once friendship in our western tradition was the supreme flower of politics, I think that if community life exists at all today, it is in some way the consequence of friendship cultivated by each one who initiates it. This goes beyond anything which people usually talk about, saying each one of you is responsible for the friendships he/she can develop, because society will only be as good as the political result of these friendships."

"Traditional education began to be reexamined. The schools had taught whole generations the values of patriotism, of obeying authority, and had perpetuated ignorance, even contempt for people of other nations, races, Native Americans, women. Not just the content of education was challenged, but the style-the formality, the bureaucracy, the insistence on subordination to authority. This made only a small dent in the formidable national system of orthodox education, but it was reflected in a new generation of teachers all over the country, and a new literature to sustain them: Jonathan Kozol, Death at an Early Age, George Denison, The Lives of Children; Ivan Illich, De-schooling Society."

"Illich lived frugally, but opened his doors to collaborators and drop-ins with great generosity, running a practically non-stop educational process which was always celebratory, open-ended and egalitarian at his final bases in Bremen, Cuernavaca and Pennsylvania. His charisma, brilliance and spirituality were clear to anyone who encountered him; these qualities sustained him in a heroic level of activity over the last 10 years in the context of terrible suffering caused by a disfiguring cancer. Following the thesis of Medical Nemesis, he administered his own medication against the advice of doctors, who proposed a largely sedative treatment which would have rendered his work impossible."

"One of the world's great thinkers, a polymath whose output covered vast terrains. He worked in 10 languages; he was a jet-age ascetic with few possessions; he explored Asia and South America on foot; and his obligations to his many collaborators led to a constant criss-crossing of the globe in the last two decades. … His critique of modernity was founded on a deep understanding of the birth of institutions in the 13th century, a critical period in church history which enlightened all of his work, whether about gender, reading or materiality. He was far more significant as an archaeologist of ideas, someone who helped us to see the present in a truer and richer perspective, than as an ideologue."

"Illich was valued during his comparatively short period of fame for the destructive possibilities of his criticisms of almost all the institutions of industrial society, capitalist or communist, in books such as Deschooling Society (1971) and Medical Nemesis (1975) … My attitude to Illich was composed half of admiration, half of irritation. He had a distinctly prophetic quality, but he could also be very silly, and some of the things he said were destructive of civilization itself... He was a flawed figure as a man and as a thinker: but so, no doubt, are we all. And unlike the other radicals of the era such as Herbert Marcuse, he still repays reading. Being not easily pigeon-holed, he forces us to think."

"Illich’s essay, "Silence is a Commons", appeared in CoEvolution Quarterly in winter 1983, and I still marvel at how much wisdom he packed into that short piece. It was still the early days of the personal computer revolution, and Illich feared that “computers are doing to communication what fences did to pastures and cars did to streets.” It’s too bad that he didn’t live to see the rise of the Internet, which in some ways has mitigated some of his fears (and in other ways, fulfilled his fears). In any case, his take on the commons and the threats to it are still worth considering."

"The credibility of the world that based itself on citizenship, on responsibility, on power, on equality, on need, claim, and entitlement – the credibility of these as ideals to which it is worthwhile to consecrate your life is declining, and, in my opinion, very fast. I want to suggest the possibility of seeing this as the end of an epoch, just like the Roman Empire at the time of Augustine, and as an entirely new access/credibility/ease of moving into the world of conspiratio, knowing that it can’t be contractually insured, that it’s a renunciation of insurance."

"Disembodiment is reaching a second level which I can only call algorithmization or mathematization. People annihilate their own sensual nature by projecting themselves into abstracta, into abstract notions. And this renunciation of intimate uniqueness through the introjection and self-ascription of statistical entities is being cultivated with extraordinary intensity by the way in which we live. This has to be explored. The consequence is an insensibility not only to myself but to you."

"God’s love is in the flesh, and the relationship between two people, the mystery of the Samaritan, is inevitably a mystery of the flesh. This becomes very difficult to explain, or even to say, in our generation, during which I believe an extraordinary process, and an extraordinary history of disinfleshment of our perceptions, our concepts and our senses has reached a high point."

"One of the hallmarks of modernity is the progressive replacement of the idea of the good by the idea of values. …. Something very fundamental gets lost when I observe myself against values rather than feel myself as a bundle of miseries, in pain, half crippled tired but bearing all this."

"The search for truth presupposes the growth of philia. This philia must find an atmosphere in which it can grow, and this atmosphere cannot be taken for granted as an out-growth of civic virtue."

"I don’t want to speak further about education here but only to show how I personally proceeded in trying to discover the origin of this belief, unknown to other societies, that you need an organised institution to make people competent to understand what is good for them and their community, that knowledge does not come from living but from education, the milk of wisdom flowing from the breasts of an institution."

"For the simple Christian there was the requirement of going to Mass every Sunday – otherwise you go to hell – or of going to confession once a year. The elaboration of this legal organisation, and this legal imposition, which defined missing out on services a sin, immediately preceded the epoch in which the state, the new Church-like state, as I called it earlier, began to introduce its own rituals. And the easiest one to follow is education."

"In this new kind of world neither the vitality of nature nor the creative act of God makes things what they are. This birthright is withdrawn, and things come to be what they are because of their genetic code, as we would say today."

"Tyranny of old was exercised over people who still knew how to subsist. They could lose their means of subsistence and be enslaved, but they could not be made needy. With the beginning of capitalist production in the spinning and weaving shops of the Florence of the Medicis, a new type of human being was being engendered: needy man, who has to organise a society, the principal function of which is to satisfy human needs. And needs are much more cruel than tyrants."

"Christ came to free us from the law, but Christianity allowed the legal mentality to be brought into the very heart of love."