Prohibition Quotes - Page 10

• By pretending that convention is Nature, that disobeying a personal prohibition is a medical illness, they establish themselves as agents of social control and at the same time disguise their punitive interventions in the semantic and social trappings of medical practice.

  Thomas Szasz

  Practice, Agents, Medical

  Thomas Stephen Szasz (1997). “The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement”, p.167, Syracuse University Press

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• For a government to declare a vice to be a crime, and to punish it as such, is an attempt to falsify the very nature of things. It is as absurd as it would be to declare truth to be a falsehood, or falsehood a truth.

  Lysander Spooner

  Truth, Government, Vices

  Lysander Spooner (2006). “Vices Are Not Crimes: A Vindication of Moral Liberty”, p.2, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• By requiring that an execution be relatively painless, we necessarily protect the inmate from enduring any punishment that is comparable to the suffering inflicted on his victim. This trend, while appropriate and required by the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, actually undermines the very premise on which public approval of the retribution rationale is based.

  John Paul Stevens

  Punishment, Suffering, Trends

  Baze v. Rees, 553 U.S. 35, www.law.cornell.edu. 2008.

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• Obviously, the state's responsibility should be to legislate rules for a well-ordered society. It has no right or duty to creep into the bedrooms of the nation.

  Pierre Trudeau

  Responsibility, Bedroom, Crime

  "The Globe and Mail" Newspaper, (p. 61), December 12, 1967.

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• Some devout Christians are among the most fervent advocates of the death penalty, contradicting Jesus Christ and justifying their belief on an erroneous interpretation of Hebrew Scriptures. "An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth," their most likely response, overlooks the fact that this was promulgated by Moses as a limitation- a prohibition against taking both eyes or all of an offender's teeth in retribution.

  Jimmy Carter

  Christian, Jesus, Eye

  Jimmy Carter (2005). “Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis”, p.82, Simon and Schuster

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• Barack Obama's understanding of what the drug war had cost the country was meaningful. And very quietly in his second term, he and Eric Holder did make some adjustments in terms of the use of the Department of Justice, on the federal level. You saw ratcheting back of drug prohibition, and mass incarceration. You also saw, on the part of some certain states, a realization that they followed the war on drugs to a useless place, that they were only doing damage to communities, and bankrupting budgets with prison construction.

  David Simon

  Meaningful, Country, War

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• [As in the case of] alcohol prohibition, illegality has driven organized crime, sent countless people to jail, and killed many thousands. Repression does not work.

  Sam Branson

  Jail, People, Alcohol

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• From the outset, MoMA followed the Bauhaus's strict prohibition against design that even hinted at the decorative, a prejudice that skewed the pioneering museum's view of Modernism for decades.

  Martin Filler

  Museums, Views, Design

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• Golf is not a good walk spoiled. It is becoming a good walk prohibited. Show me the common sense in this and I promise I will relent. But there is no common sense at all in the prohibition of walking.

  Lorne Rubenstein

  Golf, Common Sense, Promise

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• The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest form from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a natural philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society.

  H. L. Mencken

  Freedom, Philosophy, Ideas

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• The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable, of what has been expelled from the land of language, removed as a result of ancient prohibitions.

  Italo Calvino

  Ocean, Land, Language

  "Cybernetics and Ghosts" (1969)

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• God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers- at bottom merely a gross prohibition for us: you shall not think!

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Religious, Thinking, Answers

  Walter Arnold Kaufmann, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1968). “Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist”

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• After the war, Prohibition was passed, and with liquor no longer legally available the nation plunged headlong into the Great Depression.

  Dave Barry

  Funny, War, Humorous

  Dave Barry (2011). “Dave Barry Hits Below the Beltway”, p.73, Ballantine Books

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• Just as the process of repealing national alcohol prohibition began with individual states repealing their own prohibition laws, so individual states must now take the initiative with respect to repealing marijuana prohibition laws.

  George Soros

  Marijuana, Law, Alcohol

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• There is no logical basis for the prohibition of marijuana. $7.7 billion is a lot of money, but that is one of the lesser evils. Our failure to successfully enforce these laws is responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in Colombia. I haven't even included the harm to young people. It's absolutely disgraceful to think of picking up a 22-year-old for smoking pot. More disgraceful is the denial of marijuana for medical purposes.

  Milton Friedman

  Marijuana, Thinking, Years

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• "God", "immortality of the soul", "redemption", "beyond" - Without exception, concepts to which I have never devoted any attention, or time; not even as a child. Perhaps I have never been childlike enough for them?
  I do not by any means know atheism as a result; even less as an event: It is a matter of course with me, from instinct. I am too inquisitive, too questionable, too exuberant to stand for any gross answer. God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers - at bottom merely a gross prohibition for us: you shall not think!

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Children, Mean, Thinking

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2009). “Basic Writings of Nietzsche”, p.692, Modern Library

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• So many things which once had distressed or revolted him — the speeches and pronouncements of the learned, their assertions and their prohibitions, their refusal to allow the universe to move — all seemed to him now merely ridiculous, non-existent, compared with the majestic reality, the flood of energy, which now revealed itself to him: omnipresent, unalterable in its truth, relentless in its development, untouchable in its serenity, maternal and unfailing in its protectiveness.

  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

  Moving, Reality, Serenity

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• Anyone who knows he is loved is in turn prompted to love. It is the Lord himself, who loved us first, who asks us to place at the center of our lives love for him and for the people he has loved. It is especially adolescents and young people, who feel within them the pressing call to love, who need to be freed from the widespread prejudice that Christianity, with its commandments and prohibitions, sets too many obstacles in the path of the joy of love and, in particular prevents people from fully enjoying the happiness that men and women find in their love for one another.

  Pope Benedict XVI

  Love Life, Men, People

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• I maintain the importance of an absolute prohibition against torture, while acknowledging that even absolute prohibitions can sometimes be broken. If that is a contradiction, it is a contradiction that ethics has to embrace, or else it becomes like glass: hard, clear, but fatally inflexible.

  Julian Baggini

  Glasses, Broken, Ethics

  "Never saying never to torture" by Julian Baggini, www.theguardian.com. May 11, 2011.

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• The ban on sports betting does exactly what Prohibition did. It makes criminals rich.

  James Surowiecki

  Sports, Criminals, Doe

  "A ‘Grown-Up Discussion’ About Sports Betting". fifthdown.blogs.nytimes.com. February 6, 2013.

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• The U.S. Bill of Rights is being steadily eroded, with two million telephone calls tapped, 30 million workers under electronic surveillance, and, says the author, countless Americans harassed by a government that wages spurious wars against drugs and terrorism.

  Gore Vidal

  War, Rights, Government

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• And on the seventh day, god stepped back and said and said, "This is my creation, perfect in every way... oh, dammit I left all this pot all over the place. Now they'll think I want them to smoke it... Now I have to create Republicans."

  Bill Hicks

  Thinking, Perfect, Want

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• Although drugs are immoral and must be kept from the young, thousands of schools pressure parents to give the drug Ritalin to any lively child who may, sensibly, show signs of boredom in his classroom. Ritalin renders the child docile if not comatose. Side effects? "Stunted growth, facial tics, agitation and aggression, insomnia, appetite loss, headaches, stomach pains and seizures." Marijuana would be far less harmful.

  Gore Vidal

  Children, Pain, School

  "The Last Empire" by Gore Vidal, www.nytimes.com. November 1998.

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• Our current prison state has the dual effect of getting rid of a superfluous population of basically unskilled workers (with a close race-class correlation), and also demonizing them... The drug war is basically for this - It has nothing to do with drugs, but it has plenty to do with criminalizing an unwanted population and scaring everybody else.

  Noam Chomsky

  War, Race, Class

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• He who reforms himself has done more towards reforming the public than a crowd or noisy, impotent patriots.

  Johann Kaspar Lavater

  Reform, Done, Crowds

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