Laws And Government Quotes

When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it so that its professors are obliged to call for help of the civil power, ’tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.

Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.

There is a divergence between private and social accounting that the market fails to register. One essential task of law and government is to institute the necessary conditions.

Any politician who tells you morality has nothing to do with the law and government is about to do something extremely immoral.

The makers of our Constitution . . . conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone – the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

Our government… teaches the whole people by its example. If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.

Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.

A government of laws, and not of men.

It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.

History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government.

Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.