“Five lawyers have closed the debate and enacted their own vision of marriage as a matter of constitutional law… Just who do we think we are?”

Source: Utopia (1516), Ch. 7 : Of Their Slaves, and of Their Marriages
Context: They have no lawyers among them, for they consider them as a sort of people whose profession it is to disguise matters and to wrest the laws, and, therefore, they think it is much better that every man should plead his own cause, and trust it to the judge, as in other places the client trusts it to a counsellor; by this means they both cut off many delays and find out truth more certainly; for after the parties have laid open the merits of the cause, without those artifices which lawyers are apt to suggest, the judge examines the whole matter, and supports the simplicity of such well-meaning persons, whom otherwise crafty men would be sure to run down; and thus they avoid those evils which appear very remarkably among all those nations that labour under a vast load of laws. Every one of them is skilled in their law; for, as it is a very short study, so the plainest meaning of which words are capable is always the sense of their laws; and they argue thus: all laws are promulgated for this end, that every man may know his duty; and, therefore, the plainest and most obvious sense of the words is that which ought to be put upon them, since a more refined exposition cannot be easily comprehended, and would only serve to make the laws become useless to the greater part of mankind, and especially to those who need most the direction of them; for it is all one not to make a law at all or to couch it in such terms that, without a quick apprehension and much study, a man cannot find out the true meaning of it, since the generality of mankind are both so dull, and so much employed in their several trades, that they have neither the leisure nor the capacity requisite for such an inquiry.

Responding to a question about first gay divorce (July 28, 2006) - https://www.c-span.org/video/?193638-1/godless-church-liberalism
2006

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6lqx-jLCac Folake Solanke in an interview with Channels.

"The Tyranny of Values" (1967)

On overseas Chinese doing business in China, versus Americans. Interview, Enter the Dragon: Building the Chinese Powerhouse, Jun 26, 1994. http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~phalsall/texts/chinprss.html
1994

1873, Speech on Civil Rights Act (1873)

Source: The New Canada (1992), Chapter Thirteen, The Eventful Summer of 1990, p. 240

"Life Matters — Why get married when you could be happy?" http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/lifematters/monday-11th-june-2012/4058590 (11 June 2012 9:00AM), ABC, Australia