Magna Carta Quotes

To no one will we sell, to no one will we refuse or delay, right or justice.

It is supposed an undoubted right of Englishmen not to be taxed but by their own consent given through their representatives.

We have come from the divine right of kings to the divine right of the governed.

But the king should not be under any man, only under God and the law, for the law makes the king. Let the king therefore attribute to the law what the law attributes to him, namely lordship and power, for there is no king where will rules and not the law.

We nor our bailiffs will take another man’s wood for Our castles or any other purpose without the owner’s consent.

Your dependence upon the crown is no advantage, but rather an injury to the people of Britain, as it increases the power and influence of the King.

The [constitutional] safeguards of "due process of law" and "the equal protection of the laws" summarize the history of freedom of English-speaking peoples running back to Magna Carta and reflected in the constitutional development of our people.

Although Britain has, since 1653, had nothing approaching a single, codified constitution, it did for a very long time possess a broad cult of constitutional writing. The Petition of Right of 1628, like the Bill of Rights of 1689, was a cherished text. So, most of all, was Magna Carta.

Every time a government minister or spokesman lauds Magna Carta, let us boo or hiss. Shame them. And let us celebrate what it really means to our history: the ability of an emerging class to make demands against the state for new liberties and rights.

Magna Carta has 63 clauses in abbreviated Latin. Two of them that are still on the statute book, numbers 39 and 40, could be said to have changed the way in which the free world has grown.

England is the mother of Parliaments.

British democratic values are embedded in the primacy of parliament.

I love England and the historical aspect of it.

… the international Magna Carta of all mankind

The history of England is emphatically the history of progress.

I do think that Magna Carta and international law are worth paying some attention to.

Since the thirteenth century at least,--that is, since the Magna Carta,--England has been the bulwark of modern law.

The Magna Carta was the first class-based charter, enforced on the monarchy by the rising class.

Before the American Revolution, the right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures had slight existence. British policies assaulted the privacy of dwellings and places of business, particularly when royal revenues were at stake.

Is it rather stupid and dangerous to take Magna Carta so much for granted, as many of us seem to do, and to think of this attitude as 'very English?'

The democratic aspiration is no mere recent phase in human history ... It was written in Magna Carta..

The first democratic revolution was England in the 1640s.

I have great respect for British political institutions. I regard the British Parliament as the most democratic institution in the world, and the independence and impartiality of its judiciary never fail to arouse my admiration.

The fountain of power remaineth most eminently in the people; therefore it is unlimited in the people, and bounded and limited in the king, and so less in the king than in the people.

In England and, later, the United Kingdom, Habeas Corpus is a right of great antiquity: Anyone who is arrested must be brought before a court, but this does not apply in continental countries.