Quotes about legal
page 9

“San Francisco fucking rules. I am so proud of my home town for legalizing gay marriage, sending gays and lesbians down to the city by the Bay that was built on rock and roll to tie the knot.”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

From Her Weblog

Marriage, Home

“Happy family: The existence and maintenance of [this] is thought to make a politician fit for public office. According to this theory, the public are less concerned by whether or not they are effectively represented than by the need to be assured that the penises and vaginas of public officials are only used in legally sanctioned circumstances.”

John Ralston Saul The Doubter's Companion

"Happy family"
The Doubter's Companion (1994)

Family, Happiness, Making love

“The legal system can force open doors, and sometimes-even knock down walls, but it cannot build bridges. That job belongs to you and me. The country can't do it. Afro and White, rich and poor, educated and illiterate, our fates are bound together. We can run from each other, but we cannot escape each other. We will only attain freedom if we learn to appreciate what is different, and muster the courage to discover what is fundamentally the same. America's diversity offers so much richness and opportunity. Take a chance, won't you? Knock down the fences, which divide. Tear apart the walls that imprison you. Reach out. Freedom lies just on the other side. We shall have liberty for all.”

Thurgood Marshall (1908–1993) Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court

Speech delivered on September 6, 1990, before the Annual Judicial Conference of the Second Circuit, quoted in Supreme Justice Speeches and Writings Thurgood Marshall. Edited by J. Clay Smith, Jr. (2002).

Courage, Chance, Fate, Freedom

“Not only have more and more people realized that alcoholism really is a disease, but the legal system has also stated clearly in the California Supreme Court case of Sundance v. Municipal Court that people who are addicted to alcohol cannot be punished merely for their addition… It remains a critical part of our zero-tolerance policy that people who use illegal drugs cannot be considered in human terms. They must be treated as demons and we must contrast ‘drug cultures,’ on the one hand, with ‘decent’ people, on the other.”

James P. Gray (1945) American judge

Source: Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do About It: A Judicial Indictment of the War on Drugs, 2011, pp. 124-125

Parting, People, Alcohol, Disease

“Many medical and legal professionals believe that in many ways marijuana is actually less harmful than my drug of choice, alcohol. So if adults choose to use marijuana instead of alcohol, the governments, as a matter of freedom and liberty, should not be able to prohibit them from doing so.”

James P. Gray (1945) American judge

“Regulate marijuana like wine,” April 10, 2011, 2012, Gray’s campaign website, http://www.judgejimgray.com/grayarticles2.php

Way, Marijuana, Alcohol, Freedom

“It's as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working.... Hell is a collection of individuals who spend their time working on a task they don't like and are not especially good at.... Give them a few drinks, and they will launch into tirades about how pointless and stupid their job really is.... Nurses, garbage collectors, mechanics, it's obvious were they to vanish, results would be catastrophic.... A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble.... It's not clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish.... Real productive workers are squeezed and exploited. The remainder are unemployed and a larger stratum paid to do nothing.”

David Graeber (1961) American anthropologist and anarchist

Dr. David Graeber, "Bullshit Jobs," Aug 2013

Hell, Drink, Time, Suffering

“Legal intervention costs money; legal intervention opens up new avenues for abuse, including totalitarian excesses by government officials who seek to determine preferences on personal matters.”

Richard Epstein (1943) American legal scholar

[Skepticism and Freedom: A Modern Case for Classical Liberalism, https://books.google.com/books?id=B36vxZZ4cLcC, June 2003, University of Chicago Press, 978-0-226-21304-0] (quote from p. 157)

Money, Personality

“I guess in the end I'm a bit like Bill Clinton on this matter, who said that he thought [abortion] should be safe, legal and rare. And I underline 'rare'.”

Tony Abbott (1957) Australian politician

Stated in interview: "The Contender". 60 Minutes. ninemsn.com.au. 5 March 2010 http://sixtyminutes.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=1020354. Leader of the Opposition (2009-2015)

“It has long been a fashion amongst you, which you have had the complaisance to adopt at the instigation of a corrupt press, to call every friend of reform, every friend of freedom, a Jacobin, and to accuse him of French principles. ... What are these principles?—That governments were made for the people, and not the people for governments.—That sovereigns reign legally only by virtue of the people's choice.—That birth without merit ought not to command merit without birth.--That all men ought to be equal in the eye of the law.—That no man ought to be taxed or punished by any law to which he has not given his assent by himself or by his representative.—That taxation and representation ought to go hand in hand.—That every man ought to be judged by his peers, or equals.—That the press ought to be free. ... Ten thousand times as much has been written on the subject in England as in all the rest of the world put together. Our books are full of these principles. ... There is not a single political principle which you denominate French, which has not been sanctioned by the struggles of ten generations of Englishmen, the names of many of whom you repeat with veneration, because, apparently, you forget the grounds of their fame. To Tooke, Burdett, Cartwright, and a whole host of patriots of England, Scotland and Ireland, imprisoned or banished, during the administration of Pitt, you can give the name of Jacobins, and accuse them of French principles. Yet, not one principle have they ever attempted to maintain that Hampden and Sydney did not seal with their blood.”

William Cobbett (1763–1835) English pamphleteer, farmer and journalist

‘To the Merchants of England’, Political Register (29 April 1815), pp. 518–19
1810s

Time, Law, Freedom, Forgetting

“In view of this grave and unprecedented outrage, the House may be assured that his Majesty's Government will take without delay appropriate steps to vindicate the authority of the law and to protect officers and servants of the King and his Majesty's subjects in the exercise of their duties and in the enjoyment of their legal rights.”

H. H. Asquith (1852–1928) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in the House of Commons on the gun-running at Larne, Ireland (27 April 1914), quoted in The Times (28 April 1914), p. 8
Prime Minister

Housing, Law, Exercises

“If men are capable of committing evil actions, granting them power over others makes evil actions certain. But there is a difference. When men in government commit and evil act, they are legally shielded from their consequences of the act.”

Robert LeFevre (1911–1986) American libertarian businessman

Source: A Way to Be Free: The Autobiography of Robert LeFevre, Volume II, (1999), p. 487

Making love, Evil, Men

“…it was not in the dictionary. I've always said, If I had the sense I was born with and looked it up in the legal code, I would have found it.”

Harry Hay (1912–2002) American gay rights activist

And it was in the penal code, of course. It wouldn't be in any American dictionary until 1938. And in most American dictionaries not until the Second World War. We had no words for ourselves. That's the important point--we didn't have words... On not having the word to define his sexual orientation in “Meet Pioneer of Gay Rights, Harry Hay” https://progressive.org/magazine/meet-pioneer-gay-rights-harry-hay/ in The Progressive (2016 Aug 9)

Sense

“I am a citizen of Great Britain, therefore I have a legal and moral obligation to live like other Britons and raise my children as British citizens, who are free to practise any religion they like.”

Anwar Shaikh (1928–2006) British Pakistani writer

Quoted from Elst, Koenraad. The Problem with Secularism (2007)

Religion, Children

“All the learned men with all their wisdom, with all of the legal niceties they can put together on the finest of parchment, cannot produce one ton of steel.”

Walter Reuther (1907–1970) Labor union leader

1940s, Address accepting the Presidency of the CIO (1952)
Just sit down on a doorstep with a peasant in a village of Northern India and take on the task of trying to explain to him why America, conceived in freedom and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, a nation that can split the atom, that can make a pursuit ship go three times as fast as sound and yet, in this twentieth century, we can't live together in brotherhood and we continue to discriminate against Negroes. It will tax your ingenuity, and you will give them no answers. You can only give them excuses. And excuses are not good enough, if we are going to win the struggle of freedom in the world.
Source: Address accepting the Presidency of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, Atlantic City, New Jersey, December 4, 1952, as quoted in Walter P Reuther: Selected Papers (1961), by Henry M. Christman, p. 51

Learning, Men, Wisdom

“[T]he artist sells the work of his brush and in this he is a merchant. The writer sells to any who will buy, let his ideas be what they will. The teacher sells his knowledge of books—often in too low a market—to those who would have this knowledge passed on to the young.
The doctor... too is a merchant. His stock-in-trade is his intimate knowledge of the physical man and his skill to prevent or remove disabilities. ...The lawyer sometimes knows the laws of the land and sometimes does not, but he sells his legal language, often accompanied by common sense, to the multitude who have not yet learned that a contentious nature may squander quite as successfully as the spendthrift. The statesman sells his knowledge of men and affairs, and the spoken or written exposition of his principles of Government; and he receives in return the satisfaction of doing what he can for his nation, and occasionally wins as well a niche in its temple of fame.
The man possessing many lands, he especially would be a merchant... and sell, but his is a merchandise which too often nowadays waits in vain for the buyer. The preacher, the lecturer, the actor, the estate agent, the farmer, the employé, all, all are merchants, all have something to dispose of at a profit to themselves, and the dignity of the business is decided by the manner in which they conduct the sale.”

Harry Gordon Selfridge (1858–1947) America born English businessman

The Romance of Commerce (1918), Concerning Commerce

Waiting, Law, Business, Learning

“The American people deserve fair elections. Every legal - not illegal - vote should be counted. We must protect our democracy with complete transparency.”

Melania Trump (1970) Slovenian model, wife of Donald Trump and First Lady of the United States

via tweet https://twitter.com/FLOTUS/status/1325509832594616328 On November 8, 2020 2020

Democracy, People

“I think we should have international, legal community studies of cybersecurity and necessary laws, and countries should be encouraged to adopt these laws through the United Nations just like they adopt laws to prevent the abuse of children and protect human rights.
There needs to be a multidimensional, multilayered and multi-azimuth defense. That is, defense has to look in all directions. When you're talking about cybersecurity, you're talking about being able to protect your points. It's not directed against a country, but to secure your points of access or specific end points or network access. It's not as though you're arming yourself against a specific threat — you're simply undertaking all aspects of protection.”

Wesley Clark (1944) American general and former Democratic Party presidential candidate

"Civilization's High Stakes Cyber-Struggle: Q&A With Gen. Wesley Clark (ret.)" by Richard Adhikari, TechNewsWorld (2 December 2009) https://www.technewsworld.com/story/68787.html

Study, Law, Country, Children

“Communist parties are both legal and illegal, and the illegal structure governs the legal. But legality is an enormous aid to the illegal conspiracy. It prevents forthright action against the chief criminals; it leads to roundabout persecution; it enables the Communist to deceive simple, generous-hearted, and gullible citizens, and it leads to dubiously legal actions from the government itself. The present half-legal, half-persecuted position of the Party and its members is not justice. It operates to eliminate one evil with another, both evils containing dangers to the Constitutional order.”

Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961) American journalist and radio broadcaster

Source: "Let the Record Speak" 1939, “The Truth about Communism” https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015051180423&view=1up&seq=5 (1948), p. 15-16

Evil, Justice, Heart

“No lawmaker should be cashing in on their public service and selling their contacts and expertise to the highest bidder... don't think it should be legal at ALL to become a corporate lobbyist if you've served in Congress. Keeping it real, the elephant in the room with passing a lobbying ban on members requires a nearly-impossible discussion about congressional pay.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (1989) American politician

AOC Calls for Ban on Revolving Door as Study Shows Two-Thirds of Recently Departed Lawmakers Now K Street Lobbyists https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/05/30/aoc-calls-ban-revolving-door-study-shows-two-thirds-recently-departed-lawmakers-nowCommon Dreams, Eoin Higgins,] (30 May 2019) 2019

Thinking

“epic ; supreme court rules nabisco is legally allowed to label their products as "Homemade" after forcing the employees to live at the factory”

Dril Twitter user

[ Link to tweet https://twitter.com/dril/status/1288582330261467136] Tweets by year, 2020

“We have avoided the post-colonial nightmares of many a former British subject. Though that may arguably be because we were a nation, and not a randomly drawn jurisdiction without regard to ethnic loyalties or geographical sense, as were so many of the “countries” that emerged from Empire. We pride ourselves, not without cause, with only one Civil War since the foundation of the State and none within the 26 county area since the enactment of said Constitution. All’s well that ends well? Except that history is a process not a destination, and “well” or not it certainly hasn’t ended. And the foundational legal document of the State grows more convoluted with each amendment and increasingly difficult to define, even in the ordinary sense of a degree of certainty.”

Justin Barrett (1971) Irish activist

A New Constitution for a Real Republic https://nationalparty.ie/new-year-message-2020/ (July 27, 2018)

History, Country, War, Sense

“Legal coercion is a course which the law allows.”

Giles Rooke (1743–1808) British judge (1743-1808)

Cox v. Morgan (1801), 1 Bos. & Pull. 410.

Law

“Every workplace should be legally forced to be inclusive to LGBT people in job opportunities.”

Zhiar Ali (1999) Kurdish human rights activist and artist

Discussing the issue of LGBT+ individuals not getting jobs due to their sexuality.
Source: [هاوڕەگەزخوازیی لە كوردستان؛ حەزێكی سروشتیی بێ پشت و پەنا, http://www.peregraf.com/ku/report/2186/هاوڕەگەزخوازیی-لە-كوردستان؛-حەزێكی-سروشتیی-بێ-پشت-و-پەنا, پەرەگراف, May 10, 2021, ku]

People

“I was filled with determination, to do my best to expose and destroy what i then knew to be a legalized infamy, responsible for a vast destruction of human life.”

Edmund Dene Morel (1873–1924) British politician (1873-1924)

King Leopold's ghost. https://vimeo.com/ondemand/kingleopoldsghost History of the CRA, 1904, FF.

Life

“The reasons for legal intervention in favour of children, apply not less strongly to the case of those unfortunate slaves and victims of the most brutal part of mankind, the lower animals.”

John Stuart Mill book Principles of Political Economy

Book V, Chapter 11, Section 9
Principles of Political Economy (1848-1871)

Children, Animals, Parting

“We are the ones who have been operating against our public opinion, against our bureaucracy, at the very edge of legality.”

Henry Kissinger (1923–2023) United States Secretary of State

Kissinger to Nixon, quoted in Bass, G. J. (2014). The Blood telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a forgotten genocide.
Source: FRUS: Documents on South Asia, 1969–1972, vol. E-7 (online at http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve07), White House tapes, Oval Office 637-3, 12 December 1971, 8:45–9:42 a.m. Hereafter cited as FRUS, vol. E-7. quoted in Bass, G. J. (2014). The Blood telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a forgotten genocide.

“The local Catholic Church here, together with other religions present in Thailand, we have sought to offer our contribution encouraging our people to pray, promoting dialogue with everyone, educating to legality and social justice and morality in social and political activity.”

Louis Chamniern Santisukniram (1942) Archbishop of Thailand

Source: “Social injustice and corruption at the root of the crisis”: President of Thai Bishops' Conference tells Fides http://www.fides.org/en/news/26621-ASIA_THAILAND_Social_injustice_and_corruption_at_the_root_of_the_crisis_President_of_Thai_Bishops_Conference_tells_Fides (6 May 2010)

People, Education, Religion, Justice

“Legal practice has become globalized. And I advocate lawyers without borders and like doctors without borders so that you can practice anywhere in the world.”

Folake Solanke (1932) Nigerian lawyer

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

World

“It's illegal to kill yourself in a quick and painless way, but if you do it slowly over a few decades -- say by not exercising -- that's called laziness, not suicide, and it's completely legal. You might even get credit for being jolly or get a job as a TV chef on a cable network.”

Scott Adams (1957) cartoonist, writer

Source: Books, Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel (2002)

Way, Suicide, Exercises

“I will defend my right to confess my faith, so that no one else would be deprived of their right to freedom of religion and speech. I hold to the view that my expressions are legal, and they should not be censored. I will not back down from my views. I will not be intimidated into hiding my faith.”

Päivi Räsänen (1959) Finnish politician

Source: The Persecution of a Finnish Parliamentarian https://www.ncregister.com/news/the-persecution-of-a-finnish-parliamentarian (December 15, 2020)

Faith, Religion, Freedom

“[A]ttempting to organize and give structure to the study of legal silence has been a primary purpose of much of what I have written and taught over the past half-century.”

Laurence Tribe (1941) American lawyer and law school professor

Soundings and Silences (2016)

Study, Silence, Past

“There's a right of self-defense here that's involved: We know the government has to respond, so we will not be subjected to these types of attacks in the future. But the response should be measured, restrained as much as possible, to protect innocent civilians. It should not just be military. We should pursue diplomatic ways, legal ways, any other ways we can address that.”

Joseph Fiorenza (1931–2022) US Roman Catholic archbishop

Source: Bishops Write Bush to Back U.S. Efforts https://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/21/us/a-nation-challenged-support-from-churches-bishops-write-bush-to-back-us-efforts.html (21 September 2001)

Future, Way

“Support for abortion rights and legal abortion has actually increased over the years. And women have continued to access abortion services at pretty much the same rate.”

Cecile Richards (1958) American feminist and abortion rights activist

Cecile Richards on Roe v. Wade Overturn: "This Is About Maintaining Political Power" https://www.oprahdaily.com/entertainment/a39916765/cecile-richards-on-roe-v-wade-overturn-supreme-court/ (PUBLISHED: MAY 5, 2022)

Support, Women

“You can't get most people to believe how wildly the eco-laws get broken, but if I say "More than twice the legal limit," they get comfortably outraged.”

Neal Stephenson book Zodiac

Source: Zodiac (1988), Chapter 2

Law, People

“More to the point, one cannot understand The Holocaust without understanding the intentions, ideology, and mechanisms that were put in place in 1933. The eugenics movement may have come to a catastrophic crescendo with the Hitler regime, but the political movement, the world-view, the ideology, and the science that aspired to breed humans like prized horses began almost 100 years earlier. More poignantly, the ideology and those legal and governmental mechanisms of a eugenic world-view inevitably lead back to the British and American counterparts that Hitler’s scientists collaborated with. Posterity must gain understanding of the players that made eugenics a respectable scientific and political movement, as Hitler’s regime was able to evade wholesale condemnation in those critical years between 1933 and 1943 precisely because eugenics had gained international acceptance. As this book will evidence, Hitler’s infamous 1933 laws mimicked those already in place in the United States, Britain, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Canada.
So what is this scientific and political movement that for 100 years aspired to breed humans like dogs or horses? Eugenics is quite literally, as defined by its principal proponents, an attempt at “directing evolution” by controlling any aspect of human existence that affects human heredity. From its onset, Francis Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin and the man credited with the creation of the science of eugenics, knew that the cause of eugenics had to be observed with religious fervor and dedication. As the quote on the opening pages of this book illustrates, a eugenicist must “intrude, intrude, intrude.” A vigilant control over anything and everything that affects the gene pool is essential to eugenics. The policies could not allow for the individual to enjoy self-government or self-determination any more than a horse breeder can allow the animals to determine whom to breed with. One simply cannot breed humans like horses without imbuing the state with the level of control a farmer has over its livestock, not only controlling procreation, but also the diet, access to medical services, and living conditions.”

A.E. Samaan

Source: H.H. LAUGHLIN: American Scientist. American Progressive. Nazi Collaborator.

Books, World, Law, Dogs

Quotes about legal page 9

Quotes about legal
page 9