“Pyrrhus: No law demands mercy to prisoners
Agamemnon: Though the law forbids it not, yet decency forbids it.
Pyr: The victor is at liberty to do whatever he likes.
Agam.: To whom much is allowed, it is least suitable to act wantonly.”
Troades (The Trojan Women), lines 333-336
Tragedies
Original
Pyrrhus: Lex nulla capto parcit aut poenam impedit. Agamemnon: Quod non vetat lex, hoc vetat fieri pudor. Pyr: Quodcumque libuit facere victori licet. Agam.: Minimum decet libere cui multum licet.
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Seneca the Younger 225
Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, and dramatist -4–65 BCRelated quotes
The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts) (1899)
(2013): Znamy radę programową Polskiej Sieci Polityki Narkotykowej http://pulsmedycyny.pl/3413324,78023,znamy-rade-programowa-polskiej-sieci-polityki-narkotykowej. Puls Medycyny (in Polish).
Boucicault's version of The Wearing of the Green , a traditional Irish ballad, as rendered in his play Arragh na Pogue, or the Wicklow Wedding (1864)
“Closer, Changi lost its beauty and became what it was — an obscene forbidding prison.”
Prologue
King Rat (1962)
Context: Changi was set like a pearl on the eastern tip of Singapore Island, iridescent under the bowl of tropical skies. It stood on a slight rise and around it was a belt of green, and farther off the green gave way to the blue-green seas and the seas to infinity of horizon.
Closer, Changi lost its beauty and became what it was — an obscene forbidding prison. Cellblocks surrounded by sun-baked courtyards surrounded by towering walls.
Inside the walls, inside the cellblocks, story on story, were cells for two thousand prisoners at capacity. Now, in the cells and in the passageways and in every nook and cranny lived some eight thousand men....
These men too were criminals. Their crime was vast. They had lost a war. And they had lived.
Political Disquisitions (1774)
Context: That government only can be pronounced consistent with the design of all government, which allows to the governed the liberty of doing what, consistently with the general good, they may desire to do, and which only forbids their doing the contrary. Liberty does not exclude restraint; it only excludes unreasonable restraint. To determine precisely how far personal liberty is compatible with the general good, and of the propriety of social conduct in all cases, is a matter of great extent, and demands the united wisdom of a whole people. And the consent of the whole people, as far as it can be obtained, is indispensably necessary to every law, by which the whole people are to be bound; else the whole people are enslaved to the one, or the few, who frame the laws for them.
La majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain.
Le Lys Rouge http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Le_Lys_rouge/VII [The Red Lily] (1894), ch. 7
Variant: The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
Barsky v. Board of Regents, 347 U.S. 442, 470 (1954).
Judicial opinions
Writing for the court, Korematsu v. United States, 33 U.S. 124 (1944).