Statutes Quotes

• Statutes are mere milestone, telling how far yesterday's thought had traveled; and the talk of the sidewalk today is the law of the land. With us, law in nothing unless close behind it stands a warm, living public opinion.

  Wendell Phillips

  Law, Land, Yesterday

  Wendell Phillips (1864). “Speeches, Lectures, and Letters”, p.264

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• Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. Call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically, that was really, really critical for the thing to pass.

  Jonathan Gruber

  Ignorance, Stupid People, Obamacare

  "Advocate's Comments On ACA Now A Liability For Law's Supporters". "All Things Considered", www.npr.org. December 9, 2014.

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• Justice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances. Substitute statute for decision, and you shift the center of authority, but add no quota of inspired wisdom.

  Benjamin Cardozo

  Taken, Justice, Decision

  Benjamin Nathan Cardozo (1982). “Cardozo on the Law: Including the Nature of the Judicial Process, The Growth of the Law, The Paradoxes of Legal Science, Law and Literature”

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• In the insurance business, there is no statute of limitation on stupidity.

  Warren Buffett

  Stupidity, Limitation

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• There must be a law if there is to be liberty. Try to play a piano and you will run into laws as fixed as the decrees of the Medes and Persians. But through those statutes you reach the songs, drudgery leads to delight. The law of Christ brings the liberty of Christ. Keep His statutes, and they become songs. The other side of commandment is conquest. What seems restraint to the outsider means release to you.

  Adrian Rogers

  Running, Song, Mean

  Adrian Rogers (2002). “The Incredible Power of Kingdom Authority: Getting an Upper Hand on the Underworld”, p.17, B&H Publishing Group

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• If a juror feels that the statute involved in any criminal offence is unfair, or that it infringes upon the defendant's natural god-given unalienable or constitutional rights, then it is his duty to affirm that the offending statute is really no law at all and that the violation of it is no crime at all, for no one is bound to obey an unjust law.

  Harlan F. Stone

  Rights, Offending, Law

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• A business is not defined by its name, statutes, or articles of incorporation. It is defined by the business mission. Only a clear definition of the mission and purpose of the organization makes possible clear and realistic business objectives.

  Peter Drucker

  Names, Organization, Purpose

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• For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew— or a Quaker or a Unitarian or a Baptist. It was Virginia's harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson's statute of religious freedom. Today I may be the victim, but tomorrow it may be you — until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril.

  John F. Kennedy

  Religious, Virginia, Years

  Address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, delivered 12 September 1960 at the Rice Hotel in Houston, TX

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• During the whole month that negroes were being beaten by police and washed down the sewer with water hoses, Kennedy and - and King was in jail begging for the federal government to intervene, Kennedy's reply was, "No federal statutes have been violated." And it was only when the negroes erupted that Kennedy come on the television with all his old pretty words.

  Malcolm X

  Kings, Jail, Government

  Interview with Robert Penn Warren, whospeaks.library.vanderbilt.edu. June 2, 1964.

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• It's highly ironic that it was the conservatives on the court who overturned so many statutes.

  Jonathan Turley

  Ironic, Court

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• Burn all the statutes and their shelves: They stir us up against our kind; And worse, against ourselves.

  William Wordsworth

  Kind, Shelves

  William Wordsworth (1848). “The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth: Together with a Description of the Country of the Lakes in the North of England”, p.201

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• Democracy is a way of life controlled by a working faith in the possibilities of human nature. . . . This faith may be enacted in statutes, but it is only on paper unless it is put in force in the attitudes which human beings display to one another in all the incidents and relations of daily life.

  John Dewey

  Attitude, Democracy, Paper

  John Dewey, Jo Ann Boydston (1988). “The Later Works, 1925-1953”, p.226, SIU Press

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• What bitter anguish would not the people of Athens have often escaped if their government had contained so provident a safeguard against tyranny of their own passions? Popular liberty might then have escaped the indelible reproach of decreeing to the same citizens the hemlock on one day and statutes the next.

  Alexander Hamilton

  Passion, Government, People

  Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay, Henry Barton Dawson (1864). “The Fœderalist: A Collection of Essays, Written in Favor of the New Constitution, as Agreed Upon by the Fœderal Convention, September 17, 1787. Reprinted from the Original Text. With an Historical Introduction and Notes”, p.439, New York : C. Scribner ; London : Sampson Low

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• The interpretation of the laws is the proper and peculiar province of the courts. A constitution is, in fact, and must be regarded by the judges, as fundamental law. It therefore belongs to them to ascertain its meaning, as well as the meaning of any particular act proceeding from the legislative body. If there should happen to be an irreconcilable variance between the two, that which has the superior obligation and validity ought, of course, to be preferred; or, in other words, the Constitution ought to be preferred to the statute, the intention of the people to the intention of their agents.

  Alexander Hamilton

  Law, Two, People

  Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Quentin P. Taylor, John Jay (1998). “The Essential Federalist: A New Reading of the Federalist Papers”, p.145, Rowman & Littlefield

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• Now a Jew, in the dictionary, is one who is descended from the ancient tribes of Judea, or one who is regarded as descended from that tribe. That's what it says in the dictionary; but you and I know what a Jew is - One Who Killed Our Lord. And although there should be a statute of limitations for that crime, it seems that those who neither have the actions nor the gait of Christians, pagan or not, will bust us out, unrelenting dues, for another deuce.

  Lenny Bruce

  Christian, Deuces, Tribes

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• The state has a right to do that [outlaw contraceptives], I have never questioned that the state has a right to do that. It is not a constitutional right, the state has the right to pass whatever statutes they have. That is the thing I have said about the activism of the Supreme Court, they are creating right, and they should be left up to the people to decide.

  Rick Santorum

  Creating, People, Outlaw

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• When a judge assumes the power to decide which distinctions made in a statute are legitimate and which are not, he assumes the power to disapprove of any and all legislation, because all legislation makes distinctions

  Robert Bork

  Judging, Assuming, Legislation

  Robert H. Bork (2009). “The Tempting of America”, p.65, Simon and Schuster

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• All statutes to the contrary are revoked.

  Paulo Coelho

  Life, Inspiration, Contrary

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• A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it.

  Hilary Mantel

  Written

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• When we are returned to power we want to put in the statute book an act which will make our people citizens of the world before they are citizens of this country.

  Clement Attlee

  Country, Book, People

  "The Labour Party in Perspective" by Clement Attlee, Left Book Club, 1937.

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• This Old Testament - containing error, folly, absurdity and immorality - is by English statute law declared to be of divine authority, a blasphemy - if there were anyone to be blasphemed - blacker and more insolent than any word ever written or penned by the most hotheaded Freethinker.

  Annie Besant

  Errors, Law, Old Testament

  Annie Besant (2014). “The Christian Creed: Or, What it is Blasphemy to Deny”, p.56, The Floating Press

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• By placing discretion in the hands of an official to grant or deny a license, such a statute creates a threat of censorship that by its very existence chills free speech.

  Harry A. Blackmun

  Hands, Ethos, Speech

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• The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and injure those whom the state, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity.

  Anthony Kennedy

  Gay, Law, Overcoming

  "Justice Kennedy: DOMA Had to Go Because It 'Humiliates Tens of Thousands of Children'" by Erik Kain, www.motherjones.com. June 26, 2013.

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• Men decide far more problems by hate, love, lust, rage, sorrow, joy, hope, fear, illusion or some other inward emotion, than by reality, authority, any legal standard, judicial precedent, or statute.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Hate, Reality, Men

  Marcus Tullius Cicero, Edward William Sutton, Harris Rackham (1942). “Cicero, De Oratore: In Two Volumes”

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• Crime is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today, economic, political, social, and moral, conspires to misdirect human energy into wrong channels; so long as most people are out of place doing the things they hate to do, living a life they loathe to live, crime will be inevitable, and all the laws on the statutes can only increase, but never do away with, crime.

  Emma Goldman

  Hate, Law, Long

  Emma Goldman (2015). “Anarchism: Top Crime Collections”, p.33, 谷月社

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