Time & Perspective Quote by Elena Kagan

A clean little demolition of the fantasy that public office can be treated like a moral buffet. Kagan frames resignation not as melodrama or martyrdom, but as basic professional hygiene: if you can no longer argue for what the job requires, the honest move is to step aside. The phrase "positions that you can't argue" is doing heavy lifting. For a judge, especially, argument isn’t just speech; it’s a discipline. The job demands you inhabit reasoning you may dislike, to test it, refine it, and sometimes defend it when the law points that way. If you can’t even enter that mental room, you’re no longer judging; you’re vetoing.

Her subtext is a rebuke to ideological capture - the temptation to treat conscience as a trump card that overrides institutional role. Kagan’s conscience isn’t dismissed; it’s put in its proper place. She draws a hard boundary between personal conviction and the "requirements and responsibilities" of a position, signaling respect for the legitimacy of the institution itself. The civic virtue she’s gesturing at isn’t purity, it’s restraint: knowing when your moral certainty has made you unfit to wield authority over others.

The context matters because Kagan’s career has lived at the intersection of law and politics (Harvard dean, Solicitor General, Supreme Court Justice). In that world, credibility is currency. This is also a subtle warning against the corrosive habit of staying in power while privately refusing the job’s premises. Resignation becomes the ethical release valve that keeps disagreement from turning into sabotage.