August 5, 2008

"I have spent all my life under a communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worth of man either. A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man's noblest impulses. And it will be simply impossible to stand through the trials of the threatening century with only the support of a legalistic structure."
- Alexsander Solzhenitsyn's Harvard Address; Thursday June 18, 1978


"The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals."
- ibid