Albie Sachs

“There's nothing more exciting than being involved in a project that requires intelligence, thoughtfulness, a sense of history, use of language, and collegiality. It is enthralling and tedious and hard, and details matter, and it requires massive research, knowing the record and knowing the arguments; to feel the excitement that you can get through an intellectual project that has enormous public and social meaning. And I wanted to tell that story, I want to tell the story of the Constitutional Court of South Africa. Not in a technical literary way.”

“Everything, in my life has been defined in actions -”

“It's having, a belief that we can make a difference.”

“All revolutions are impossible until they happen. Then they become inevitable.”

“Violence of apartheid was just wrong. Terrorism was based on the use of indiscriminate violence, directed at civilian people because they happened to belong to a particular group, race, or community. It was completely antithetical to our ideals. We were fighting for justice against the system of white supremacy, not against a race.”

“Severability is an important concept in the context of the relations between this Court and Parliament; like 'reading down', it is an instrument of judicial restraint which reduces the danger of producing an overbroad judicial reaction to overbroad legislation.”