Saturday, June 24, 2023

The old rights and responsibilities problem....

Human rights' are a fine thing, but how can we make ourselves sure that our rights do not expand at the expense of the rights of others. A society with unlimited rights is incapable of standing to adversity. If we do not wish to be ruled by a coercive authority, then each of us must rein himself in. . . . A stable society is achieved not by balancing opposing forces but by conscious self-limitation: by the principle that we are always duty-bound to defer to the sense of moral justice.

-attributed to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, from Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals

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