“A society based on the letter of the law and never reaching any higher, fails to take advantage of the full range of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes men’s noblest impulses …. After a certain level of the problem has been reached, legalistic thinking induces paralysis, it prevents one from seeing the scale and meaning of events.”
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Speech to 1978 graduation class at Harvard College