Justice & Law Quote by David E. Price

“Honest discussions” is the kind of phrase that sounds innocuous until you notice what it’s doing politically: it shifts the burden of democratic repair away from institutions and onto everyday civic behavior. David E. Price, a career legislator with a professor’s temperament, isn’t selling a hot-blooded populism here. He’s prescribing a discipline. The insistence that dialogue matters “even and perhaps especially” when we disagree is a quiet rebuke to two common temptations in modern politics: performative outrage (where disagreement becomes content) and ideological insulation (where disagreement becomes contamination).

The line about resisting “hypocrisy and arrogance” reveals the real target. Price isn’t primarily worried about the other side’s bad faith; he’s warning that moral certainty is itself a corrosive force. “Honest” does double duty as both method and virtue: it implies a willingness to concede complexity, to admit tradeoffs, to risk being seen as inconsistent. That’s not accidental coming from a politician, a profession often caricatured as strategically slippery. He’s arguing that integrity is not a personality trait but a practice, maintained through friction with people who won’t simply mirror you back.

Then he pivots to “liberty and justice for all,” a phrase freighted with civic liturgy. The subtext is that the American promise is not self-executing; it’s upheld through habits of argument that keep power accountable and keep citizens humble. Invoking founding ideals also functions as coalition language: a way to frame disagreement not as national rupture, but as a test of whether we can still share a democratic vocabulary.