Rules for rules.....................

 

Freedom is a vital food for the human soul.  In the concrete sense of the word, freedom means the possibility of choice.  A real possibility, naturally.  Wherever there is communal life, it is inevitable that choices will be restricted by rules that are necessary in the interest of the common good. . . .

     Rules must be simple and reasonable enough for anyone who wishes to do so, and who has an average faculty of attention, can both understand the utility to which they correspond and the necessities of fact that impose them.  Rules must emanate from an authority regarded not as a stranger or an enemy, but which is loved and seen to belong to those it governs.  They must be stable, few and general enough to be assimilated into thought once and for all, and not create a conflict each time a decision has to be taken.

-Simone Weil, The Need for Roots