Legality and Legitimacy Quotes

“Norms are valid only for normal situations.”
― Carl Schmitt, Legality and Legitimacy

“In general, it would be a peculiar type of 'justice' to declare a majority all the better and more just the more overwhelming it is, and to maintain abstractly that ninety-eight people abusing two persons is by far not so unjust as fifty-one people mistreating forty-nine. At this point, pure mathematics becomes simple inhumanity.”
― Carl Schmitt, Legality and Legitimacy

“The emptiness of mere majority calculus deprives legality of all persuasive power.”
― Carl Schmitt, Legality and Legitimacy

“The principle of equal chance is of such sensitivity that any serious doubt about the loyalty of all participants already renders the principle's application impossible. For it is self-evident that one can hold open an equal chance only for those whom one is certain would do the same.”
― Carl Schmitt, Legality and Legitimacy

“Without sense of contradiction, for example, once can today consider a dissolution of the Reichstag 'strictly legal,' even though it is, in fact, a coup d'etat, and, vice versa, a parliamentary dissolution might substantively conform to the spirit of the constitution, and yet not be legal. Such antitheses document the breakdown of a system of legality, which ends in a formalism and functionalism without substance or reference points.”
― Carl Schmitt, Legality and Legitimacy

“If the parliamentary legislative state typically permits a 'state of exception' with the suspension of basic rights, its intention is not to render the special commissioner equivalent with the legislature or the special commissioner's decrees equivalent with statutes, but to create the freedom to issues measures that are necessary and effective.”
― Carl Schmitt, Legality and Legitimacy

“If the assumptions underlying the legislative state of the parliamentary-democratic variety are no longer tenable, then closing one's eyes to the concrete constitutional situation and clinging to an absolute, 'value-neutral,' functionalist and formal concept of law, in order to save the system of legality, is not far off. The 'law,' then, is only the present decision of the momentary parliamentary majority.”
― Carl Schmitt, Legality and Legitimacy

“An unconditional equivalence of law with the results of any particular formal process, therefore, would only be blind subordination to the pure decision of the offices entrusted with lawmaking, in other words, a decision detached from every substantive relation to law and justice, and, consequently, an unconditional renunciation of any resistance.”
― Carl Schmitt, Legality and Legitimacy

“The preexisting and presumed congruence and harmony of law and statute, justice and legality, substance and process dominated every detail of the legal thinking of the legislative state. Only through the acceptance of these parings was it possible to subordinate oneself to the rule of law precisely in the name of freedom.”
― Carl Schmitt, Legality and Legitimacy