Sometimes you don't know if you're Caesar about to cross the Rubicon or Captain Queeg cutting your own tow line.
Interpretation
The quote reflects uncertain decision-making, contrasting bold leadership with paranoid self-sabotage.
This quote by Anthony Kennedy uses historical and literary references to illustrate the ambiguity between making a decisive, courageous choice (like Caesar crossing the Rubicon) and acting out of fear or insecurity, leading to detrimental outcomes (like Captain Queeg severing his own ties). It suggests that in moments of critical decision, one must discern whether they are taking a bold step forward or retreating from responsibility in a harmful way.
In practice
In a leadership seminar, this quote could be used to prompt discussion on taking risks in decision-making.
First Amendment freedoms are most in danger when the government seeks to control thought or to justify its laws for that impermissible end. The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought.
We must never lose sight of the fact that the law has a moral foundation, and we must never fail to ask ourselves not only what the law is, but what the law should be.
At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.
The lessons of the First Amendment are as urgent in the modern world as the 18th Century when it was written. One timeless lesson is that if citizens are subjected to state-sponsored religious exercises, the State disavows its own duty to guard and respect that sphere of inviolable conscience and belief which is the mark of a free people.
The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and injure those whom the state, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity.
I didn't set out to discover a truth. I was actually sent to the Outer Fringes to conduct a chair census and learn some humility. But the truth inevitably found me, as important truths often do, like a lost thought in need of a mind.
People are slow to claim confidence in undertakings of magnitude.
Who doesnβt respect and value his past, is not worth the honour of the present, and has no right to a future
One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.
In the end the great truth will have been learned that the quest is greater than what is sought, the effort finer that the prize (or rather, that the effort is the prize), the victory cheap and hollow were it not for the rigor of the game.
No living person is sunk so low as not to be imitated by somebody.
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