“What pleases the prince has the force of law.”

Source: The Power of Kings, p. 318

Source: The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759), Chapter 3

No Name in the Street (1972)
Context: The prison is overcrowded, the calendars full, the judges busy, the lawyers ambitious, and the cops zealous. What does it matter if someone gets trapped here for a year or two, gets ruined here, goes mad here, commits murder or suicide here? It's too bad, but that's the way the cookie crumbles sometimes. I do not claim that everyone in prison here is innocent, but I do claim that the law, as it operates, is guilty, and that the prisoners, therefore, are all unjustly imprisoned. Is it conceivable, after all, that any middle-class white boy -- or, indeed, almost any white boy -- would have been arrested on so grave a charge as murder, with such flimsy substantiation, and forced to spend, as of this writing, three years in prison? What force, precisely, is operating when a prisoner is advised, requested, ordered, intimidated, or forced, to confess to a crime he has not committed, and promised a lighter sentence for so perjuring and debasing himself? Does the law exist for the purpose of furthering the ambitions of those who have sworn to uphold the law, or is it seriously to be considered as a moral, unifying force, the health and strength of a nation?

PBS, March 12, 1998 http://www.pbs.org/newshour/forum/march98/intervention_3-12.html.
Quotes 1990s, 1995-1999
Context: The U. S. has always insisted on its right to use force, whatever international law requires, and whatever international institutions decide.… The U. S., of course, is not alone in these practices. Other states commonly act in much the same way, if not constrained by external or internal forces.

Source: City of Ashes

Bk. 4, ch. 1
Policraticus (1159)

The line of differentiation between the masses and the Remnant is set invariably by quality, not by circumstance. The Remnant are those who by force of intellect are able to apprehend these principles, and by force of character are able, at least measurably, to cleave to them. The masses are those who are unable to do either.
Source: Isaiah's Job (1936), II

On Compromise http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11557/11557-h/11557-h.htm (1874).