Eleanor Roosevelt Quotes

Because just as good morals, if they are to be maintained, have need of the laws, so the laws, if they are to be observed, have need of good morals.

If the law is upheld only by government officials, then all law is at an end.

Moral change still depends on the individual and not on the passage of any law.

It is the duty of a citizen not only to observe the law but to let it be known that he is opposed to its violation.

The individual is not accountable to society for his actions, insofar as these concern the interests of no person but himself.

A government must govern, must prescribe and enforce laws within its sphere or cease to be a government. Moreover, the individual must be independent and free within his own sphere or cease to be an individual. The fundamental question ... is now, and always will be through what adjustments, by what actions, these principles may be applied.

… every citizen of the republic ought to consider himself an unofficial policeman, and keep unsalaried watch and ward over the laws and their execution.

No one is responsible under liberalism.

The law is an adroit mixture of customs that are beneficial to society, and could be followed even if no law existed, and others that are of advantage to a ruling minority, but harmful to the masses of men, and can be enforced on them only by terror.

Liberty without virtue would be no blessing to us.

In any society that is governed by the rule of law, some form of morality is always imposed. It's inescapable.

It is necessary to make virtue fashionable.

Rights that do not flow from duty well performed are not worth having.

In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously.

When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.

Since the state is a community of human beings it is as truly subject to the moral law as any private society.

For why should my freedom be judged by another’s conscience?

Our whole system of self-government will crumble either if officials elect what laws they will enforce or citizens elect what laws they will support.

The most dangerous aspect of contemporary life is the dissolution of the feeling of individual responsibility.

The individual is prior to society and society must be ordered to the good of the individual.

Human laws are entirely destitute of the sanction of rewards. To confer honors for obedience would be as ridiculous as unavailing. The honor of many would resolve itself into the honor of none. To dispense pecuniary rewards would be nugatory or impracticable. In an unqualified extent, no government would be able to supply the funds; and even in a restricted form, its operation would be to receive money with one hand as a premium, and to pay it back with the other in the shape of a tax.

I have not much faith in "good government." What we need is the development of the individual.

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.

When each citizen submits himself to the authority of law he does not thereby decrease his independence or freedom, but rather increases it. By recognizing that he is a part of a larger body which is banded together for a common purpose, he becomes more than an individual, he rises to a new dignity of citizenship. Instead of finding himself restricted and confined by rendering obedience to public law, he finds himself protected and defended and in the exercise of increased and increasing rights.