Education Quote by Stephen Breyer

Breyer’s line is doing quiet triage on a civic emergency: the slow decay of legitimacy. He’s not praising education as self-improvement or merit-badge attainment. He’s treating it as infrastructure for a constitutional system that can’t police its own meaning by force. “People have to be educated” reads less like a plea for more diplomas than for public literacy in how institutions work: why courts decide the way they do, what precedent is for, what “rule of law” costs when you don’t like the outcome.

The pressure point is “stick to it.” That’s the hard part Breyer is naming without dramatics: democracy requires emotional discipline. You don’t just understand norms; you recommit when they frustrate you. In judicial terms, that’s acceptance of an adverse ruling without reaching for delegitimizing stories that make compliance optional. The subtext is contemporary and unmistakable: a country where “the judge is a partisan” has become a ready-made script, and where legal disagreement gets repackaged as existential theft.

“Respect” here isn’t deference to robed authority so much as respect for process - the idea that outcomes are tethered to reasons, not vibes, and that power is constrained by something other than winning. Breyer’s warning - “an awful lot is lost” - is deliberately unspecific because the cascade is. Lose respect, and you don’t just lose faith in courts; you lose a shared referee, then a shared reality about what counts as fair, then the habit of losing without treating it as illegitimate. For a judge whose job depends on compliance from people who can’t all be persuaded, that’s not philosophy. It’s survival logic.