Our constitutional system is defined by a balance between the public's need for transparency and the government's need to have a zone of secrecy around decision making. Both are important, yet they are mutually exclusive.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the tension between transparency and secrecy in governance.
Neal Katyal's quote underscores the complexity of democratic governance, illustrating how the public's desire for transparency can often conflict with the government's need for certain confidential processes. It emphasizes that while both transparency and secrecy are crucial for effective governance, they cannot coexist harmoniously, creating a challenging dynamic that policymakers must navigate.
In practice
This quote can be used in a political debate to discuss the importance of transparency in government.
In every free and deliberating society, there must, from the nature of man, be opposite parties, and violent dissensions and discords; and one of these, for the most part, must prevail over the other for a longer or shorter time.
Insurrection. An unsuccessful revolution; disaffection's failure to substitute misrule for bad government.
I cannot define for you what God is. I can only say that my work has proved empirically that the pattern of God exists in every man and that this pattern has at its disposal the greatest of all his energies for transformation and transfiguration of his natural being. Not only the meaning of his life but his renewal and his institutions depend on his conscious relationship with this pattern of his collective unconscious.
The Bible recognizes no faith that does not lead to obedience, nor does it recognize any obedience that does not spring from faith. The two are at opposite sides of the same coin.
The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.
But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.