“Have you noticed that the people who actually make the laws, the people in power, never make laws for themselves?”

Slavery in Massachusetts http://thoreau.eserver.org/slavery.html (1854)

(Autumn 1792) [Source: Oeuvres Complètes de Saint-Just, vol. 1 (2 vols., Paris, 1908), p. 380]

Attributed, In the Media

Usenet
Context: You can’t make people happy by law. If you said to a bunch of average people two hundred years ago “Would you be happy in a world where medical care is widely available, houses are clean, the world’s music and sights and foods can be brought into your home at small cost, traveling even 100 miles is easy, childbirth is generally not fatal to mother or child, you don’t have to die of dental abcesses and you don’t have to do what the squire tells you” they’d think you were talking about the New Jerusalem and say ‘yes’.

Source: Red Mars (1992), Chapter 6, “Guns Under the Table” (p. 394)

Source: Cry, the Beloved Country

According to Kenneth Owen Morgan (The Illustrated History of Britain (1984) p. 421) this was said by Macaulay in 1832. If so, he was quoting a letter written by Edmund Burke in 1777.
Attributed

Letter to Charles James Fox (8 October 1777)
1770s

My Day (1935–1962)
Context: Little by little it dawned upon me that this law was not making people drink any less, but it was making hypocrites and law breakers of a great number of people. It seemed to me best to go back to the old situation in which, if a man or woman drank to excess, they were injuring themselves and their immediate family and friends and the act was a violation against their own sense of morality and no violation against the law of the land. (14 July 1939)