Stefan Zweig Quotes
A word is nothing unless it has values and an atmosphere, unless you grasp its historical significance.
Zweig, Stefan. The World of Yesterday. Viking Press, 1943.
Justice Holmes was explaining the shortcoming of taking words, spoken or written, literally and not looking further to try and determine the actual intent. This becomes a major legal issue when trying to determine the original intent of legislators of the framers of the Constitution. We all have written things which when interpreted to by others end up with a meaning different from what we intended. In the legislative process with the negotiations over wording, committees, and tradeoffs, it is often very hard to determine what the originators had in mind for in many situations they disagreed about the issue but ended up compromising on some specific language which might represent a consensus or might not even represent anyone’s view.
He was discussing his unprecedented steps that as Federal Reserve Chairman he took to cope with the Great Recession after the Meltdown of 2008. He had, as a graduate doctoral student, studied the economic history of the Great Depression of 1929 and the government attempts to ameliorate some of the effects. He was one of the few people in government who had this historical perspective.
Stefan Zweig was an Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer. At the height of his literary career, in the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most widely translated and most popular writers in the world.
