(Autumn 1792) [Source: Oeuvres Complètes de Saint-Just, vol. 1 (2 vols., Paris, 1908), p. 419]
On the government's proposed Reconciliation and Unity Commission, 24 July, 2005
“Everything can be inherited except sterility.”
Source: The Red Queen (1993), Ch. 1. Human Nature
“Once again prosperous and successful crime goes by the name of virtue; good men obey the bad, might is right and fear oppresses law.”
rursus prosperum ac felix scelus virtus vocatur; sontibus parent boni, ius est in armis, opprimit leges timor.
Hercules Furens (The Madness of Hercules), lines 251-253; (Amphitryon)
Alternate translation: Successful and fortunate crime is called virtue. (translator unknown)
Alternate translation: Might makes right. (translator unknown).
Tragedies
The Lord Chancellor's Song (from Iolanthe).
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Variant: The Law is the true embodiment
Of everything that's excellent.
It has no kind of fault or flaw,
And I, my Lords, embody the Law.
Interview in Playboy (January 1965) https://web.archive.org/web/20080706183244/http://www.playboy.com/arts-entertainment/features/mlk/04.html
1960s
Source: Law and Authority (1886), I
Context: In existing States a fresh law is looked upon as a remedy for evil. Instead of themselves altering what is bad, people begin by demanding a law to alter it. … In short, a law everywhere and for everything! A law about fashions, a law about mad dogs, a law about virtue, a law to put a stop to all the vices and all the evils which result from human indolence and cowardice.
We are so perverted by an education which from infancy seeks to kill in us the spirit of revolt, and to develop that of submission to authority; we are so perverted by this existence under the ferrule of a law, which regulates every event in life — our birth, our education, our development, our love, our friendship — that, if this state of things continues, we shall lose all initiative, all habit of thinking for ourselves. Our society seems no longer able to understand that it is possible to exist otherwise than under the reign of law, elaborated by a representative government and administered by a handful of rulers. And even when it has gone so far as to emancipate itself from the thralldom, its first care has been to reconstitute it immediately. "The Year I of Liberty" has never lasted more than a day, for after proclaiming it men put themselves the very next morning under the yoke of law and authority.
Source: Star Bridge (1955), “The History,” prelude to Chapter 3, “The Narrow Bridge” (p. 37)
Source: Death by Black Hole - And Other Cosmic Quandaries
“There can be no prosperity without law and order”
2010s, 2016, July, (21 July 2016)
