Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"We enact many laws that manufacture criminals, and then a few that punish them."

~ Benjamin R. Tucker  

"If you give me six lines written by the most honest man, I will find something in them to hang him."

~ Cardinal Richelieu  

"Formerly we suffered from crimes; now we suffer from laws."

~ Cornelius Tacitus  

"Do you think that we want those laws to be observed? We want them broken. There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power the government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws."

~ Ayn Rand  

"One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws, but conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws."

~ Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  

"Never give in. Never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy."

~ Sir Winston Churchill  

"If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his case, it follows that he can choose his defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people he thinks he should get, rather than cases that need to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him. It is in this realm -- in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies. It is here that law enforcement becomes personal, and the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group, being attached to the wrong political views, or being personally obnoxious to or in the way of the prosecutor himself."

~ Justice Robert H. Jackson  

"The difference between a politician and a pickpocket is that the pickpocket doesn't get indignant when you tell him to keep his hands to himself."

~ Joseph Sobran  

"There is no distinctly native American criminal class save Congress."

~ Mark Twain  

"We have met the enemy and he is us."

~ Walt Kelly  

"The test for whether one is living in a police state is
that those who are charged with enforcing the law
are allowed to break the laws with impunity."

~ Jon Roland  

"The government is the potent omnipresent teacher. For good or ill it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that the end justifies the means -- to declare that the government may commit crimes -- would bring terrible retribution."

~ Justice Louis D. Brandeis  

"The vices of the rich and great are mistaken for error; and those of the poor and lowly, for crimes."

~ Lady Marguerite Blessington