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History matters to constitutional interpretation because people believe that history bestows authority on their arguments or, conversely, that it undermines the authority of opposing arguments. History matters in constitutional interpretation because authority matters.

It is when the desire for choice is broken that what men do thereby loses all moral value, and actions lose all significance (in terms of good and evil) in their own eyes; that is what is meant by destroying people’s self-respect, by turning them, in your words, into rags.

...resistance to [the institutions of the polis] – in the name of individual liberty or even peaceful retreat from the market-place into private life – is scarcely conceived. Idiotes means just ‘private citizen’, but in so far as such a person is concerned with his own private affairs at the expense of those of the city, it can be a pejorative term, like the modern word etymologically related to it.

The unfree man is like someone who is drugged or hypnotised: whatever explanations he may advance himself for his behaviour, it remains unaltered by any change in his ostensible, overt motives and policies; we consider him to be in the grip of forces over which he has no control, not free, when it is plain that his behaviour will be predictably the same whatever reasons he advances for it.

Principles are not less sacred because their duration cannot be guaranteed.

Wunder

Hier ruht die ehr- und tugendsame Jungfrau,
Genoveva Roggenhuber,
betrauert von ihren einzigen Sohne.

Schicksal

Hier ruht in Gott Herr F.K.
27 Jahre lebte er als Mensch
Und 37 Jahre als Ehemann.

Dank

Durch einen Ochsenstoß
Kam ich in des Himmels Schooß.
Mußte ich auch gleich erblassen
Und Weib und Kind verlassen,
Kam ich doch zur ewigen Ruh’
Durch dich, du Rindvieh du.

Wie sich der Mensch vom Rindvieh unterscheidet

Dem Ochsen gibt das Wasser kraft,
Dem Mensch Bier und Rebensaft.
Drum laßt uns trinken Bier und Wein,
Denn keiner will ein Rindvieh sein.
(Lechtal)

Wenn eine bayerische Schuhplattlertruppe in einem Fremdenverkehrsort auftritt, dann ist ihr nicht nur der Beifall, sondern auch die Zuneigung der anwesenden weiblichen Zuschauer sicher. Das bayerische Mannsbild ist eben gefragt im Touristikgeschäft und sonnt sich gerne unter diesen Strahlen der Bewunderung.

…if one generation, in passing on land to the next, leaves it tamed and cultivated, then the next generation is not beholden to nature alone, but to those who gave them nature ‘improved.’ The urge to benefit one’s posterity is a noble one, to be recognized and encouraged: One generation fights for a liberty only its descendants will enjoy in peace.

What troubles the consciences of Western liberals is, I think, the belief, not that the freedom that men seek differs according to their social or economic conditions, but that the minority who possess it have gained it by exploiting, or, at least, averting their gazes from, the vast majority who do not.

Laß dir sagen, über die früheren Zeiten geht doch nichts. Da hat’s noch eine Gemütlichkeit gegeben, und wenn einer studiert hat, wie unser Pfarrer Tremmel, dann ist er immer noch ein Mensch geblieben und hat das Herz am rechten Fleck behalten.

...the defence of their kingdoms was the natural duty of free and noble men, and perhaps the concept of honour at that period compelled those in high positions in the kingdoms to guarantee the liberty and reputation of the territories they controlled. The establishment of the armed forces here was an accepted activity for the nobility and for high dignitaries of the order of free men.

This was the drop of water that makes the cup run over.

…there are affronts whose cruelty freezes the heart and paralyses the tongue.

If we insist on judging others in terms of our transient standards we must not protest too much if they, in their turn, judge us in terms of theirs, which sanctimonious persons among us are too swift to denounce for no better reason that that they are not ours.

Our values – what we think is good and bad, important and trivial, right and wrong, noble and contemptable – all these are conditioned by the place we occupy in the pattern, on the moving stair…To each condition and generation its own perspectives on the past and future, depending upon where it has arrived, what it has left behind, and whither it is moving; its values depend on this same awareness.

But what has the colour of one’s skin to do with faith? ‘Man is just like a sword, whose sheath represents the pigmentation of his skin; but the sharp edge of the steel blade symbolizes moral values that count much more!’ he thought.

The historical approach is inescapable: the very sense of contrast and dissimilarity with which the past affects us provides the only relevant background against which the feature peculiar to our own experience stand out in sufficient relief to be adequately discerned and described.

Legal liberties are compatible with extremes of exploitation, brutality and injustice.

In a continent where the heat in certain regions reaches 40 [degrees] in the shade, should our African ‘emancipation’ consist of the three-piece all-wool suit and the bottle of scotch? Should it not rather have its source in our own deep roots in that distant past, and, at the same time, in the opening-up of our new frontiers to universal values?

In a word, we appear to assign an arbitrarily chosen and strictly pendulumlike rhythm to realities to which such regularity is entirely alien. It is an impossible task. Naturally we do very badly at it. We must look for something better.

A word is valued much less for its etymology than for the use to which it is put.

The textbooks, always admirable tools of sclerosis…

We have acquired the right of disbelief, because we understand, better than in the past, when and why we ought to disbelieve. And it is by this means that science has succeeded in throwing off the dead weight of a great many spurious problems.

Anyone who took part in the Battle of Waterloo knew that Napoleon was beaten. Any witness so singular as to deny the defeat we should regard as a liar. Moreover, if we confine ourselves to the simple, blunt statement, there are not very many different ways of saying that Napoleon was beaten at Waterloo.

Romanticism wished to steep itself in the living spring of the primitive, as well as in that of the popular. So it was that the periods which were the most bound by tradition were also those which took the greatest liberties with their true heritage. It is as if, in a curious compensation for an irresistible creative urge, that were naturally led, by sheer force of their veneration of the past, to invent it.

Our War College and General Staff are not the only institutions in France which have preserved the mentality of the oxcart in the age of the automobile.

Misunderstanding of the present is the inevitable consequence of ignorance of the past. But a man may wear himself out just as fruitlessly in seeking to understand the past, if he is totally ignorant of the present.

In a world where absolute data and information are the vital currency—you might say, a world where absolute data and information are the gods—we do well, I am convinced, to remember the power of the non-absolute, the power of story, myth, ceremony, ritual, and symbol. I see myself appearing a thousand times in the Greek myths—as fool, bungler, criminal, lover, villain, and—very rarely—hero.

You always know when the gods are angry. You don’t always know why.