Justice & Law Quote by Breyten Breytenbach

Rights don’t earn their keep in calm weather; they’re stress-tested in the storm. Breyten Breytenbach’s line flips a common rhetorical escape hatch - the idea that “extraordinary times” justify suspending ordinary moral rules - and exposes it as a category error. If human rights are treated as optional, they’re not rights at all, just social preferences that evaporate under pressure.

The intent is accusatory but disciplined: it targets the bureaucratic language that sanitizes abuse (“abnormal circumstances,” “extreme example”) and uses that same diction to spring the trap. The quiet punch is “kick in,” a phrase drawn from mechanics and policy manuals, implying a system that is supposed to activate automatically. Breytenbach is asking why the machine keeps failing exactly when it’s needed most - and who benefits from calling the moment an exception.

Subtext: emergency is the favorite costume of power. Once the state (or any authority) labels a situation “extreme,” it claims permission to downgrade the person into a problem to be managed. Breytenbach insists on the reverse hierarchy: the more frightening the context, the more vigilant the moral standard, because fear is when communities are most willing to barter away other people’s dignity for a sensation of control.

Context matters because Breytenbach isn’t speaking abstractly. As a South African writer and anti-apartheid dissident who was imprisoned by the apartheid regime, he knew how “abnormal” gets manufactured and then used as a permanent alibi. The sentence reads like a rebuttal to every tribunal, memo, and press conference that ever tried to make cruelty sound like crisis management.