Legal Oppression Quotes

Whenever the law gets its hands on you, those who use the law to their own advantage will also turn it against you. Don't put your trust in the laws of men, Alvin. They were designed by strong men to improve their power over weaker ones.

There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the name of justice.

An application of judicial power that does not rest on facts is worse than mindless, it is inherently dangerous. If its deployment does not rest on facts - cold, hard, solid facts, established either by admissions or by trials - it serves no lawful or moral purpose and is simply an engine of oppression.

Men's indignation, it seems, is more excited by legal wrong than by violent wrong; the first looks like being cheated by an equal, the second like being compelled by a superior.

There is scarce a poor man in England of forty years of age, I will venture to say who has not in some part of his life felt himself most cruelly oppressed by this ill-contrived law of settlement.

Women are a sisterhood. They make common cause in behalf of the sex; and, indeed, this is natural enough, when we consider the vast power that the law gives us over them.

The law has no claim to human respect. It has no civilizing mission; its only purpose is to protect exploitation.

Strict law is often great injustice.

When in all the nations of the world the rule of law is the darling of the leaders and the plague of the people, we ought to begin to recognize this.

People crushed by law have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws.

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

In fact, if law were restricted to protecting all persons, all liberties, and all properties; if law were nothing more than the organized combination of the individual's right to self-defense; if law were the obstacle, the check, the punisher of all oppression and plunder - is it likely that we citizens would then argue much about the extent of the franchise?

The very concept of law that protects us from tyranny has been lost. No longer the people's shield, law has become a weapon in the hands of government.

Judges... are picked out from the most dextrous lawyers, who are grown old or lazy, and having been biased all their lives against truth or equity, are under such a fatal necessity of favoring fraud, perjury and oppression, that I have known several of them to refuse a large bribe from the side where justice lay, rather than injure the faculty by doing any thing unbecoming their nature in office.

So long as society is founded on injustice, the function of the laws will be to defend injustice. And the more unjust they are the more respectable they will seem.

Law is death. The more of the law in a country, the worse for the country.

If the jury have no right to judge of the justice of a law of the government, they plainly can do nothing to protect the people against the oppressions of the government; for there are no oppressions which the government may not authorize by law.

[T]hough individual oppression may now and then proceed fro the courts of justice, the general liberty of the people can never be endangered from that quarter . . .

Of all injustice, that is the greatest which goes under the name of law, and of all sorts of tyranny the forcing of the letter of the law against the equity, is the most insupportable.

... Virtue owns a more eternal foe Than Force or Fraud: old Custom, legal Crime, And bloody Faith the foulest birth of Time.

The law was made for one thing alone, for the exploitation of those who don't understand it, or are prevented by naked misery from obeying it.

No oppression is so heavy or lasting as that which is inflicted by the perversion and exorbitance of legal authority.

Do we need recourse to a happier state before the law in order to maintain that contemporary gender relations and the punitive production of gender identities are oppressive?

The law is not just and is an infringement of our constitutional and treaty rights.