Alan Dershowitz Quotes

People must live with the laws that we make.

The submission of free people to the executive authority of government, is no more than a compliance with laws which they themselves have enacted.

Whatever the People has last ordained shall be held as binding by law.

Public officers are the servants and agents of the people, to execute the laws which the people have made.

Let us give our Republic not the best possible laws but the best which they will bear.

I know no human being exempt from the law. The law is the security of the people of England; it is the security of every person that is governed, and of every person that governs.

The constitution is a sacred document in a democracy.

The vision that the founding fathers had of rule of law and equality before the law and no one above the law, that is a very viable vision, but instead of that, we have quasi mob rule.

Laws made by common consent must not be trampled on by individuals.

Any government is free to the people under it where the laws rule and the people are a party to the laws.

Albania under law is the motto that leads our vision.

Freedom depends upon something. The rule of law.

What is going to rule our great commonwealth, the mob or the law?

We are ruled by public opinion, not by statute law.

The highest test of a people's fitness for free institutions is their willingness to obey law.

Though written constitutions may be violated in moments of passion or delusion, yet they furnish a text to which those who are watchful may again rally and recall the people. They fix, too, for the people the principles of their political creed.

Democracy is much too important to be left to public opinion.

The body-politic is formed by a voluntary association of individuals: It is a social compact, by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good. It is the duty of the people, therefore, in framing a Constitution of Government, to provide for an equitable mode of making laws, as well as for an impartial interpretation, and a faithful execution of them; that every man may, at all times, find his security in them.

The general laws of the kingdom may be enacted only with the consent of the king and the nation. If the king proposes a law, the nation accepts or rejects it; if the nation demands a law, it is for the king to consent or to reject it

The danger to all well-established free governments arises from the unwillingness of the people to believe in its existence.

...no country can be well governed unless its citizens as a body keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians of the law and that the law officers are only the machinery for its execution, nothing more.

A republican is someone who defends public institutions and democratic values, someone who is a defender of public life, someone who respects the principles of liberty, so in that sense we are very calm and at ease.

While a law is in force it should be lived up to. You have a right to try to change it, and if you can persuade the majority that it should be changed then it will be changed. But you must abide by a law until it is changed or you will be flouting the fundamental things that make us a democracy and a law-abiding nation.

It is a fundamental principle of democracy that citizens obey the law or incur whatever penalty applies to its breaking.

We are a country based on the rule of law.