“Steal a loaf of bread and they hang you, steal a land and they'll make you king.”
David Gemmell book Stormrider
Source: Rigante series, Stormrider, Ch. 5
“What a pity that he who steals a penny loaf should be hung, whilst he who steals thousands of the public money should be acquitted!”
Source: 1806 journal entry on the acquittal of Lord Melville for misappropriation of public funds, as quoted in Stuart J. Reid, Lord John Russell (1895), p.9
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John Russell, 1st Earl Russell14
leading Whig and Liberal politician who served as Prime Min… 1792–1878Related quotes
“Those who corrupt the public mind are just as evil as those who steal from the public purse.”
Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN
Speeches of Adlai Ewing Stevenson (1952), p. 99
Courtney Love (1964) American punk singer-songwriter, musician, actress, and artist
On race and the music industry, 24 Hours of Love MTV2 Special (21 September 2005)
1996–2005
Ellen Willis (1941–2006) writer, activist
"Our Mobsters, Ourselves", The Nation (2 April 2001) https://www.thenation.com/article/our-mobsters-ourselves/ <br class="br">Context: In its original literal sense, "moral relativism" is simply moral complexity. That is, anyone who agrees that stealing a loaf of bread to feed one's children is not the moral equivalent of, say, shoplifting a dress for the fun of it, is a relativist of sorts. But in recent years, conservatives bent on reinstating an essentially religious vocabulary of absolute good and evil as the only legitimate framework for discussing social values have redefined "relative" as "arbitrary." That conflation has been reinforced by social theorists and advocates of identity politics who argue that there is no universal morality, only the value systems of particular cultures and power structures. From this perspective, the psychoanalytic – and by extension the psychotherapeutic – worldview is not relativist at all. Its values are honesty, self-knowledge, assumption of responsibility for the whole of what one does, freedom from inherited codes of family, church, tribe in favor of a universal humanism: in other words, the values of the Enlightenment, as revised and expanded by Freud's critique of scientific rationalism for ignoring the power of unconscious desire.
Osama bin Laden (1957–2011) founder of al-Qaeda
In response to the interviewer stating: 'What can the U.S. expect from you now?'
1990s, Time magazine interview (1998)
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician
Letter to A.N. Pleshcheev (October 25, 1888)
Letters
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America
1780s, Letter to Peter Carr (1787)
Context: He who made us would have been a pitiful bungler, if he had made the rules of our moral conduct a matter of science. For one man of science, there are thousands who are not. What would have become of them? Man was destined for society. His morality, therefore, was to be formed to this object. He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong, merely relative to this.
“He who jumps for the moon and gets it not leaps higher than he who stoops for a penny in the mud.”
Howard Pyle book The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood
Source: The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood
