Democracy is always a beckoning goal, not a safe harbor. For freedom is an unremitting endeavor, never a final achievement.
Interpretation
Democracy requires continual effort and is never fully achieved.
In this quote, Felix Frankfurter emphasizes that democracy is not a destination where one can simply rest after reaching it; instead, it is an ongoing process that demands constant commitment and work. He suggests that freedom and democracy are dynamic pursuits that require vigilance and active participation to maintain and improve, rather than static states of being.
In practice
During a lecture on civic engagement, this quote can illustrate the importance of active participation in democracy.
Ultimately there can be no freedom for self unless it is vouchsafed for others; there can be no security where there is fear, and a democratic society presupposes confidence and candor in the relations of men with one another and eager collaboration for the larger ends of life instead of the pursuit of petty, selfish or vainglorious aims.
The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day. It does come, however slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority.
Without a free press there can be no free society. That is axiomatic. However, freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of a free society. The scope and nature of the constitutional guarantee of the freedom of the press are to be viewed and applied in that light.
The words of the Constitution... are so unrestricted by their intrinsic meaning or by their history or by tradition or by prior decisions that they leave the individual Justice free, if indeed they do not compel him, to gather meaning not from reading the Constitution but from reading life.
Litigation is the pursuit of practical ends, not a game of chess.
As a member of this court I am not justified in writing my private notions of policy into the Constitution, no matter how deeply I may cherish them or how mischievous I may deem their disregard.
It is idle to say that nations can struggle to outdo each other in building armaments and never use them. History demonstrates the contrary, and we have but to go back to the last war to see the appalling effect of nations competing in great armaments.
If I could give you only one advice, I would say: Don't identify with anything. Be completely empty - no one. Be no-body and see if you lose anything but delusion.
Our Christian witness is authentic when it is faithful and unconditional.
I had forgotten: this is what it feels like to live in time. The lurching forward, the sensation of falling of a cliff into darkness, and then landing abruptly, surprised, confused, and then starting the whole process again in the next moment, doing that over and over again, falling into each instant of time and then climbing back up only to repeat the process.
All life is part of a complex relationship in which each is dependent upon the others, taking from, giving to and living with all the rest.
If a poor family falls on hard times in the woods, and no one is around to care, did it really happen?
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