Quotes about legal
page 2

Jodi Picoult photo
Thomas Jefferson photo

“Tyranny is defined as that which is legal for the government but illegal for the citizenry.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

A wonderful quote, if only it were true, despite no shortage image-quote-memes online. note: "Spurious" here: https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/tyranny-defined-which-legal-government-spurious-quotation note: "Not True"
Source: https://www.truthorfiction.com/thomas-jefferson-tyranny-is-defined-as-that-which-is-legal-for-the-government-quote/

Conan O'Brien photo
David Foster Wallace photo
Michael Crichton photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo

“One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963)
Source: Letter from the Birmingham Jail
Context: One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."

Ron Paul photo
Norman Tebbit photo
Elena Kagan photo
Karl Heinrich Ulrichs photo

“The prohibition of the expression of the sex drive, i. e., between consenting adults in private, lies outside the legal sphere.”

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825–1895) German jurist, writer and pioneer of LGBT human rights

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. The riddle of "man-manly love": the pioneering work on male homosexuality, Volume 2, Prometheus Books, 1994. p. 604

Bernard Harcourt photo
Chuck Schumer photo

“People who enter the United States without our permission are illegal aliens and illegal aliens should not be treated the same as people who enter the United States legally.”

Chuck Schumer (1950) U.S. Senator from the State of New York

Speech on immigration https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdL2k8jbnAs (24 June 2009), quoted in "Schumer talks tough on immigration reform issue" https://www.newsday.com/news/nation/schumer-talks-tough-on-immigration-reform-issue-1.1868825 by Tom Brune, Newsday.com (18 April 2010)

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad photo
Buddy Carter photo
Anthony Giddens photo

“A patent is a legal analog of sticky fly paper: it attracts some of the lowest forms of life.”

David L. Webster (1888–1976) American Physicist

in his autobiography, as quoted by [Peter Louis Galison, Bruce William Hevly, Big science: the growth of large-scale research, Stanford University Press, 1992, 0804718792, 55]

L. David Mech photo
Henry Hawkins, 1st Baron Brampton photo

“Legality and oppression are not unknown to run hand in hand.”

Henry Hawkins, 1st Baron Brampton (1817–1907) British judge

Roberts v. Jones; Willey v. Great Northern Railway Co. (1891), L. R. 2 Q. B. [1891], p. 203.

Alan Keyes photo
Dave Barry photo

“We need our highest judicial body to stop this childish bickering and get back to debating the kinds of weighty constitutional issues that have absorbed the court in recent years, such as whether a city can legally force an exotic dancer to cover her entire nipple, or just the part that pokes out.”

Dave Barry (1947) American writer

Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up http://books.google.com/books?id=Dl1Q8FYJT1cC&pg=PA57&dq=%22We+need+our+highest+judicial+body+to+stop+this+childish+bickering%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=2H22UMHfGYeGiQKdp4GwBw&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22We%20need%20our%20highest%20judicial%20body%20to%20stop%20this%20childish%20bickering%22&f=false
Dave Barry is not Making This Up (1994)

Amartya Sen photo
Harry V. Jaffa photo
Hillary Clinton photo
David D. Friedman photo
Gustav Radbruch photo
Edward Macnaghten, Baron Macnaghten photo

“It is not the function of a Court of justice to enforce or give effect to moral obligations which do not carry with them legal or equitable rights.”

Edward Macnaghten, Baron Macnaghten (1830–1913) Anglo-Irish rower, barrister, politician and Lord of Appeal in Ordinary

Blackburn, Low & Co. v. Vigors (1887), L. R. 12 Ap. Ca. 543.

Arthur Koestler photo
John Lancaster Spalding photo
Heather Brooke photo
Roy Moore photo
Jordan Peterson photo

“The idea of white privilege is absolutely reprehensible. And it's not because white people aren't privileged. We have all sorts of privileges, and most people have privileges of all sorts, and you should be grateful for your privileges and work to deserve them. But the idea that you can target an ethnic group with a collective crime, regardless of the specific innocence or guilt of the constituent elements of that group - there is absolutely nothing that's more racist than that. It's absolutely abhorrent. If you really want to know more about that sort of thing, you should read about the Kulaks in the Soviet Union in the 1920's. They were farmers who were very productive. They were the most productive element of the agricultural strata in Russia. And they were virtually all killed, raped, and robbed by the collectivists who insisted that because they showed signs of wealth, they were criminals and robbers. One of the consequences of the prosecution of the Kulaks was the death of six million Ukrainians from a famine in the 1930's. The idea of collectively held guilt at the level of the individual as a legal or philosophical principle is dangerous. It's precisely this sort of danger that people who are really looking for trouble would push. Just a cursory glance at 20th century history should teach anyone who wants to know exactly how unacceptable that is.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Concepts

Fali Sam Nariman photo
Hannah Arendt photo
Ron Paul photo
Ernesto Che Guevara photo
Daniel Pipes photo
Hillary Clinton photo

“When they talk about legal status, that's code for second-class status.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

May 5, 2015
Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016)

Alice Cooper photo

“How old are you? Sixteen? S-seventeen? [asks security guard] Is seventeen legal?”

Alice Cooper (1948) American rock singer, songwriter and musician

From a Texas concert in 1973, recorded in Good to See You Again, Alice Cooper http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQdhKUNkdUg&feature=player_embedded#at=235.

George Sutherland photo

“The legal right of a taxpayer to decrease the amount of what otherwise would be his taxes, or altogether avoid them, by means which the law permits, cannot be doubted.”

George Sutherland (1862–1942) Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, United States Senator, member of the United States House of Re…

Gregory v. Helvering, 293 U.S. 465, 469 (1935)

Thomas Jefferson photo

“The art and mystery of banks… is established on the principle that 'private debts are a public blessing.' That the evidences of those private debts, called bank notes, become active capital, and aliment the whole commerce, manufactures, and agriculture of the United States. Here are a set of people, for instance, who have bestowed on us the great blessing of running in our debt about two hundred millions of dollars, without our knowing who they are, where they are, or what property they have to pay this debt when called on; nay, who have made us so sensible of the blessings of letting them run in our debt, that we have exempted them by law from the repayment of these debts beyond a give proportion (generally estimated at one-third). And to fill up the measure of blessing, instead of paying, they receive an interest on what they owe from those to whom they owe; for all the notes, or evidences of what they owe, which we see in circulation, have been lent to somebody on an interest which is levied again on us through the medium of commerce. And they are so ready still to deal out their liberalities to us, that they are now willing to let themselves run in our debt ninety millions more, on our paying them the same premium of six or eight per cent interest, and on the same legal exemption from the repayment of more than thirty millions of the debt, when it shall be called for.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

ME 13:420
1810s, Letters to John Wayles Eppes (1813)

George Eliot photo
Richard Stallman photo

“Dutch pedophiles have formed a political party to campaign for legalization.
I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

"Dutch paedophiles form political party" (5 June 2006) https://www.stallman.org/archives/2006-may-aug.html#05%20June%202006%20%28Dutch%20paedophiles%20form%20political%20party%29
2000s

Orson Scott Card photo
Marc Randazza photo
Clarence Darrow photo

“Wars always bring about a conservative reaction. They overwhelm and destroy patient and careful efforts to improve the condition of man. Nothing can be heard in the cannon's roar but the voice of might. All the safeguards laboriously built to preserve individual freedom and foster man's welfare are blown to pieces with shot and shell. In the presence of the wholesale slaughter of men the value of life is cheapened to the zero point. What is one life compared with the almost daily records of tens of thousands or more mowed down like so many blades of grass in a field? Building up a conception of the importance of life is a matter of slow growth and education; and the work of generations is shattered and laid waste by machine guns and gases on a larger scale than ever before. Great wars have been followed by an unusually large number of killings between private citizens and individuals. These killers have become accustomed to thinking in terms of slaying and death toward all opposition, and these have been followed in turn by the most outrageous legal penalties and a large increase in the number of executions by the state. It is perfectly clear that hate begets hate, force is met with force, and cruelty can become so common that its contemplation brings pleasure, when it should produce pain.”

Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union

Source: The Story of My Life (1932), Ch. 26 "The Aftermath Of The War"

Narendra Modi photo
Averroes photo
Jerome Frank photo
Louis Althusser photo
Joseph Addison photo

“No oppression is so heavy or lasting as that which is inflicted by the perversion and exorbitance of legal authority.”

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) politician, writer and playwright

Samuel Johnson in The Rambler, no. 148 (17 August 1751).
Misattributed

Jürgen Habermas photo
Christopher Hitchens photo
Frank Johnson Goodnow photo

“The conventional model for explaining the uniqueness of American democracy is its division between executive, legislative, and judicial functions. It was the great contribution of Frank J. Goodnow to codify a less obvious, but no less profound element: the distinction between politics and policies, principles and operations. He showed how the United States went beyond a nation based on government by gentlemen and then one based on the spoils system brought about by the Jacksonian revolt against the Eastern Establishment, into a government that separated political officials from civil administrators.
Goodnow contends that the civil service reformers persuasively argued that the separation of administration from politics, far from destroying the democratic links with the people, actually served to enhance democracy. While John Rohr, in his outstanding new introduction carefully notes loopholes in the theoretical scaffold of Goodnow's argument, he is also careful to express his appreciation of the pragmatic ground for this new sense of government as needing a partnership of the elected and the appointed.
Goodnow was profoundly influenced by European currents, especially the Hegelian. As a result, the work aims at a political philosophy meant to move considerably beyond the purely pragmatic needs of government. For it was the relationships, the need for national unity in a country that was devised to account for and accommodate pluralism and diversity, that attracted Goodnow's legal background and normative impulses alike. That issues of legitimacy and power distribution were never entirely resolved by Goodnow does not alter the fact that this is perhaps the most important work, along with that of James Bryce, to emerge from this formative period to connect processes of governance with systems of democracy.”

Frank Johnson Goodnow (1859–1939) American historian

Abstract, 2009 edition:
Politics and Administration (1900)

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad photo
Alfred de Zayas photo
Thomas Rex Lee photo
Roger Scruton photo
Hannah Arendt photo

“Eichmann, much less intelligent and without any education to speak of, at least dimly realized that it was not an order but a law which had turned them all into criminals. The distinction between an order and the Führer's word was that the latter's validity was not limited in time and space, which is the outstanding characteristic of the former. This is also the true reason why the Führer's order for the Final Solution was followed by a huge shower of regulations and directives, all drafted by expert lawyers and legal advisors, not by mere administrators; this order, in contrast to ordinary orders, was treated as a law. Needless to add, the resulting legal paraphernalia, far from being a mere symptom of German pedantry and thoroughness, served most effectively to give the whole business its outward appearance of legality.And just as the law in civilized countries assumes that the voice of conscience tells everybody, "Thou shalt not kill," even though man's natural desires and inclinations may at times be murderous, so the law of Hitler's land demanded that the voice of conscience tell everybody: "Thou shalt kill," although the organizers of the massacres knew full well that murder is against the normal desires and inclinations of most people. Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it — the quality of temptation.”

Source: Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Ch. VIII.

Gustav Radbruch photo
Lucy Stone photo
Peter Sunde photo
Gustav Radbruch photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Kofi Annan photo
Antonin Scalia photo

“This case, involving legal requirements for the content and labeling of meat products such as frankfurters, affords a rare opportunity to explore simultaneously both parts of Bismarck's aphorism that 'No man should see how laws or sausages are made.”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Community Nutrition Institute v. Block, 749 F.2d 50, 51 (D.C. Cir. 1984) ; decided December 5, 1984.
1980s

A. P. Herbert photo
Léon Blum photo
John R. Commons photo

“Legally, the term liberty means absence of duty, or rather the limit of duty.”

John R. Commons (1862–1945) United States institutional economist and labor historian

Source: Legal foundations of capitalism. 1924, p. 53

Jonathan Edwards photo
Paul Johnson photo
David D. Friedman photo

“Legal rules are to be judged by the structure of incentives they establish and the consequences of people altering their behavior in response to those incentives”

David D. Friedman (1945) American economist, physicist, legal scholar, and libertarian theorist

Source: Law's Order: What Economics Has to Do With Law and Why It Matters, 2001, p.11

Herman Cain photo

“I do not think abortion should be legal in this country. Abortion should not be legal. That is clear. But if a family made the decision to break the law, that's that family's decision.”

Herman Cain (1945) American writer, businessman and activist

America Live
Fox News
2011-10-21
Television, quoted in * Herman Cain: I’m Not Pro-Choice, I’m Pro-Choice On Getting An Illegal Abortion
Mediaite
2011-10-21
Alex
Alvarez
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/herman-cain-im-not-pro-choice-im-pro-choice-on-getting-an-illegal-abortion/
2011-10-23

Fred Thompson photo

“After sleeping late on Sunday, I was back at my desk that afternoon. I had two prime considerations. First, I wanted to be certain that the tapes were not a trap for the committee or that there was a significant bit of missing information that we lacked; experience taught me that matters of this importance do not usually fall into your lap without more complications that are immediately apparent. Second, if our information was legitimate, I wanted to be sure the White House was fully aware of what was to be disclosed so that it could take appropriate action. Legalisms aside, it was inconceivable to me that the White House could withhold the tapes once their existence was made known. I believed it would be in everyone’s interest if the White House realized, before making any public statements, the probable position of both the majority and the minority of the Watergate committee. Even though I had no authority to act for the committee, I decided to call Fred Buzhardt at home. Buzhardt was the only White House staff member with whom I had had any substantial contact. He had been unassuming and straightforward in his dealings with me. He never tried to enlist me in any White House strategy, to suggest that I relay confidential information, or to so any of the things that were probably assumed by many of the so-called sophisticates in Washington.”

Fred Thompson (1942–2015) American politician and actor

page 86
At That Point in Time, Warning the White House about the Watergate tapes

Anton Chekhov photo
Donald J. Trump photo
Andrew Dickson White photo
Koenraad Elst photo

“In Swami Dayananda's view, the term Arya was not coterminous with the term Hindu. The classical meaning of the word Arya is 'noble'. It is used as an honorific term of address, used in addressing the honoured ones in ancient Indian parlance. The term Hindu is reluctantly accepted as a descriptive term for the contemporary Hindu society and all its varied beliefs and practices, while the term Arya is normative and designates Hinduism as it ought to be…. Elsewhere in Hindu society, 'Arya' was and is considered a synonym for 'Hindu', except that it may be broader, viz. by unambiguously including Buddhism and Jainism. Thus, the Constitution of the 'independent, indivisible and sovereign monarchical Hindu kingdom' (Art.3:1) of Nepal take care to include the Buddhist minority by ordaining the king to uphold 'Aryan culture and Hindu religion' (Art.20: 1)…. The Arya Samaj's misgivings about the term Hindu already arose in tempore non suspecto, long before it became a dirty Word under Jawaharlal Nehru and a cause of legal disadvantage under the 1950 Constitution. Swami Dayananda Saraswati rightly objected that the term had been given by foreigners (who, moreover, gave all kinds of derogatory meanings to it) and considered that dependence on an exonym is a bit sub-standard for a highly literate and self-expressive civilization. This argument retains a certain validity: the self-identification of Hindus as 'Hindu' can never be more than a second-best option. On the other hand, it is the most practical choice in the short run, and most Hindus don't seem to pine for an alternative.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

2000s, Who is a Hindu, (2001)

George W. Bush photo
Andrei Sakharov photo
African Spir photo
Judea Pearl photo
Earl Warren photo
Neil Gorsuch photo
Hugo Black photo
Ernesto Che Guevara photo
H.L. Mencken photo

“Time is the great legalizer, even in the field of morals.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

Source: 1910s, A Book of Prefaces (1917), Ch. 4