Edmund Burke Quotes

The law can seem remote, arcane, the stuff of specialists. But it isn't, because for those of us who live in democracies, the law begins with us.

There should be a law to the People besides its own will.

You know, if government were a product, selling it would be illegal. Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have.

The best laws cannot make a constitution work in spite of morals; morals can turn the worst laws to advantage.

Wise laws and just restraints are to a noble nation not chains, but chains of mail, -- strength and defense, though something of an incumbrance.

The freedom of a government does not depend on the quality of its laws, but upon the power that has the right to create them.

We have moved from an age in which government leaders sought to do what was best for the people to one in which the political leadership is convinced it knows what is best for the people, whether they like it or not.

We need people in the areas that create laws and policies who are filled with the Kingdom so that those laws can become the fabric of our social development.

How dare politicians continue to pass insane laws forcing good, law-abiding people to be defenseless and helpless.

Democracy, Republic: What do these words signify? What have they changed in the world? Have men become better, more loyal, kinder? Are the people happier? All goes on as before, as always. Illusions, illusions.

In my view it is time to pass a good bill, a fair bill, a comprehensive bill ... Too many have been waiting too long for fairness.

I see myself as more of a policy maker than a political leader.

It is always unconscionable for the government to punish people for expressing an idea merely because government officials - or the majority of citizens - decide that those ideas are 'dangerous' or 'wrong.' That is a power nobody ought to possess.

The war on drugs is really the war on people who buy drugs from people who don't lobby the government.

The government understands - every government, every administration, both parties, understands - that that power, they just don't have.

American government is not dominated by engineers, it is dominated by lawyers. Engineers are interested in substance and building things; lawyers are interested in process and rights and getting the ideology correctly blended. And so there is sort of no really concrete plan for the future.

What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy.

How can you pass laws about things that nobody knows?" "They do it all the time," says Hayden. "That's what law is: educated guesses at right and wrong.

You see, that's the whole point of being in government. If you don't like something you simply make up a law that makes it illegal.

Law is order in liberty, and without order liberty is social chaos.

The happiest people are the ones who follow their own dreams most closely.

America is a country of laws.

The virtue of a democratic system with a [constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech] is that it readily enables the people, over time, to be persuaded that what they took for granted is not so, and to change their laws accordingly.

The masses are the material of democracy, but its form-that is to say, the laws which express the general reason, justice, and utility-can only be rightly shaped by wisdom, which is by no means a universal property.

Sometimes the state and the constitution are more enlightened than society.