Justice & Law Quote by Warren Christopher

Warren Christopher frames his apprenticeship under Justice William O. Douglas as less résumé line than initiation rite: a permission slip to stop treating public service as paperwork and start treating it as lived contact with consequence. Douglas, the famously restless Supreme Court justice, is an inspired choice of mentor for this message. His “stream of history” isn’t a library metaphor; it’s a current that pulls you off the shore of caution. The line works because it casts risk as duty and movement as moral clarity, the opposite of the lawyerly instinct to stall until certainty arrives.

Christopher’s intent is quietly self-justifying, but not vain. He’s explaining a career often associated with measured diplomacy - Vietnam-era law, Carter’s State Department, the Balkans, the Middle East - through a single directive: don’t spectate. The subtext is that institutions tend to reward distance: memos, process, and the safety of incrementalism. Douglas’s advice punctures that. It also flatters Christopher’s self-image as a man who entered events rather than merely managed them, while admitting the anxiety underneath: history is messy, and “see what happens” concedes you cannot fully control outcomes.

Context matters. Christopher came of age when American power and American idealism were both expanding, then colliding with televised war, protest, and geopolitical uncertainty. “Get out” is a rebuke to the idea that the law (or any bureaucracy) can substitute for judgment in motion. It’s a statesman’s version of the long view: step into the current, accept you’ll get wet, and let the era test what you’re made of.