Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
Justice
& Law
- "You seem ... to consider the judges as the ultimate
arbiters of all contitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which
would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy... The Contitution has erected no such
single tribunal."
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Thomas Jefferson, 1820
- Sir William Blackstone: "The most universal and effectual
way of discovering the true meaning of law, when the words are dubious, is by considering
the reason and spirit of it; or the cause which moved the legislator to enact it; for when
this reason ceased, the law itself ought likewise to cease with it."
- John Dean: "If Watergate had succeeded, what would have
been put into the system for years to come? People thinking the way Richard Nixon thought
and thinking that is the way it should be. It would have been frightening."
- Dr. Bill Bennett, President Reagan's Secretary of Education, author of The
Death of Outrage: "Those who constantly invoke the sentiment of
'Who are we to judge?' should consider the anarchy that would ensue if we adhered to this
sentiment in, say, our courtrooms. What would happen if those sitting on a jury
decided to be 'nonjudgmental' about rapists and sexual harassers, embezzlers and
tax cheats? Justice would be lost. Without being 'judgmental,' Americans would never have
put an end to slavery, outlawed child labor, emancipated women... "How do we
judge a wrong -- any wrong whatsoever -- when we have gutted the principle of judgment
itself? ... We all know that there are times when we will have to judge others,
when it is right and necessary to judge others. If we do not confront the soft
relativism that is currently disguised as a virtue, we will find ourselves morally and
intellectually disarmed... The threats we now face are from within. They are far
more difficult to detect, more insidious: decadence, cynicism, and boredom... Mr.
Clinton [is] 'our first president to be strengthened by
charges of immorality.' ... We do not expect our presidents to have lived lives
of near perfection. We should not even expect all our presidents to have the sterling
character of say, a Washington or a Lincoln, although we should hope for it ... [Recent
presidents] had an assortment of flaws and failings. They made mistakes. But at the end of
the day, they were men whose character, at least, we could count on. Bill Clinton's is
not. The difference between these men and Mr. Clinton is the difference between
common human frailty and corruption."
- Abraham Lincoln: "Whenever I hear anyone arguing for
slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally."
- Chief Justice William Rehnquist, in dissent, Santa Fe v. Doe, a case
that prohibited prayer at a high school football game: "Even more
disturbing than its holding is the tone of the Court's opinion; it bristles with hostility
to all things religious in public life. Neither the holding nor the tone of the opinion is
faithful to the Establishment Clause, when it is recalled that George Washington himself,
at the request of the very Congress which passed the Bill of Rights, proclaimed a day of
'public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the
many and signal favors of Almighty God.'"
Anon.:
"A Great law protects me from the government; the
Bill of Rights has 10 Great laws. A Good law
protects me from you; laws
against murder, theft, assault and the like are
good laws. A Poor law attempts to protect me from myself."
- Daniel Defoe: "Justice is always violent
to the party offending, for every man is innocent in his own eyes."
- Martin Luther King: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to
justice everywhere."
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick, chapter 53: "Because,
in the case of pirates, say, I should like to know whether that profession of theirs has
any peculiar glory about it. It sometimes ends in uncommon elevation, indeed; but
only at the gallows. And besides, when a man is elevated in that odd fashion, he
has no proper foundation for his superior altitude. Hence, I conclude, that in boasting
himself to be high lifted above a whaleman, in that assertion the pirate has no solid
basis to stand on."
- Pat Buchanan, Jan. 21, 2002: "By
2050, half of all the people of European descent will be over 50, with 10 percent of
Europe over 80. With Christianity fading away in the West, with 60 million aged Europeans
over 80 to be cared for, the course set by the old submariner [Admiral Nimitz, Jr.,
suicide] will be followed by tens of thousands... A prediction: In coming decades,
involuntary euthanasia will be commonplace in Europe, and Gen-Xers' battles to
stay alive into old age will be treated with the same cold contempt as they treated the
silent screams of the unborn. Millions will be put to sleep like aged and
incontinent household pets. Since the 1960s, the radical young have pleaded for a
world free of the strictures of the old Christian morality. They are close to getting what
they have demanded; and my sense is that they will not like what they get. We are
heading into Bladerunner Country."
- Seneca:
"The wise man will not pardon every crime that should be punished, but he will
accomplish in a nobler way all that is sought in pardoning. He will spare some and watch
over some because of their youth, and others on account of their ignorance. His clemency
will not fall short of justice, but will fulfil it perfectly."
- Cicero:
"They who say that we should love our fellow citizens but not foreigners,
destroy the universal brotherhood of mankind, and thus benevolence and justice
would perish for ever."
- Cicero:
"Let us not listen to those who think that we ought to be angry with our enemies, and
who believe this to be great and manly. Nothing is more praiseworthy, nothing so clearly
shows a great and noble soul, as clemency and readiness to forgive."
- Marcus Aurelius: "I have formed the ideal of a state, in which there is the
same law for all, and equal rights and equal liberty of speech established, an empire
where nothing is honoured so much as the freedom of the citizen."
- William Lloyd Garrison: "That which
is not just is not law."
- Thomas Jefferson: "The care of every man's soul belongs to
himself. But what if he neglect the care of it? Well what if he neglect the care of his
health or his estate, which would more nearly relate to the state. Will the magistrate
make a law that he not be poor or sick? Laws provide against injury from others; but not
from ourselves. God himself will not save men against their wills."
- Thomas Jefferson, letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush, 1803: "It
behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it
in the case of others: or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his
own."
- Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History: "No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime
to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or
institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of
experiment in the laboratory of history."
- Bill Moyers, intro to The Power of Myth:
Commenting on the work of Joseph Campbell: "Consider the position of judges in our
society, which Campbell saw in mythological, not sociological, terms. If this position
were just a role, the judge could were a gray suit to court instead of the
magisterial black robe. For the law to hold authority beyond mere coercion, the
power of the judge must be ritualized, mythologized. So must much of life today, Campbell
said, from religion and war to love and death."
- Thomas Paine: "He that would make his own liberty secure
must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a
precedent that will reach to himself."
- John Locke: "The people cannot delegate to government the
power to do anything which would be unlawful for them to do themselves."
- Anacharsis, Scythian philosopher, 600 BC: "Written laws are
like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while
the rich and powerful easily break through them."
- Diogenes Laertius, biographer of Greek philosophers, 200 AD: "Solon
used to say ... that laws were like cobwebs -- for if any trifling or powerless thing fell
into them, they held it fast; while if it were something weightier, it broke through them
and was off."
- Francis Bacon, The Essays of Counsels, Civil and Moral, 1625: "Judges
ought to remember that their office is jus dicere, and not jus dare; to
interpret law, and not to make law, or give law."
- Henry Ward Beecher, Proverbs from Plymouth, 1867: "Law
represents the effort of men to organize society; governments, the efforts of selfishness
to overthrow liberty."
- Prince Otto Von Bismarck: "All treaties between great
states cease to be binding when they come in conflict with the struggle for
existence."
- Marcus Cicero, De Officiis, 44 BC: "The more laws,
the less justice."
- Demonax, Roman philosopher, c. 150 AD: "Probably all laws
are useless; for good men do not want laws at all, and bad men are made no better by
them."
- Michel De Montaigne, Essays, 1580: "The laws keep up their
credit, not by being just, but because they are laws; 'tis the mystic foundation of their
authority; they have no other, and it well answers their purpose. They are often made by
fools; still oftener by men who, out of hatred to equality, fail in
equity; but always by men, vain and irresolute authors."
- Charles de Secondat, The Spirit of Laws, 1748: "In
republican governments, men are all equal; equal they are also in despotic governments; in
the former, because they are everything; in the latter, because they are nothing."
- Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, 1849: "I think we should be men first, and subjects afterwards. It is not
desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only
obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right."
- John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859: "The only
purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized
community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical
or moral, is not a sufficient warrant."
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 7 June 1978, Harvard University: "I
have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society
without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other
scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either."
- Lord Stowell, Attorney General of England, 1800: "A
precedent embalms a principle."
- 16 Am. Jur., Sec. 177 late 2d, Sec. 256: "No one is bound
to obey an unconstitutional law and no courts are bound to enforce it."
- Baron Thurlow: "Did you ever expect a corporation to have a
conscience, when it has no soul to be damned, or a body to be kicked?"
- "... bearing in mind T. R. Glover's comment on a
Roman Emperor's condemnation of the Apostle to the Gentiles -- that the day was to come
when men would call their dogs Nero and their sons Paul."
F.F. Bruce
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