Passed As Laws Quotes & Sayings

What's on the outside to prevent their return? They are now convicted felons, a branding they will never be able to shake. The odds were stacked against them to begin with, and now that they're tagged as felons, life in the free world is somehow supposed to improve? These are the real casualties of our wars. The war on drugs. The war on crime. Unintended victims of tough laws passed by tough politicians over the past forty years. One million young black men now warehoused in decaying prisons, idling away the days at taxpayer expense. Our prisons are packed. Our streets are filled with drugs. Who's winning the war? — John Grisham

Laws could be passed to keep the leader of a government from getting too much power. — Thomas More

All the fruit is ripe, plunged in fire, cooked,
And they have passed their test on earth, and one law is this:
That everything curls inward, like snakes,
Prophetic, dreaming on
The hills of heaven. And many things
Have to stay on the shoulders like a load
of failure. However the roads
Are bad. For the chained elements,
Like horses, are going off to the side,
And the old
Laws of the earth. And a longing
For disintegration constantly comes. Many things however
Have to stay on the shoulders. Steadiness is essential.
Forwards, however, or backwards we will
Not look. Let us learn to live swaying
As in a rocking boat on the sea. — Friedrich Holderlin

[We] need the same advice that was given to Martha. If we but do "the one thing needful," there is no occasion for us to be "anxious and troubled" about the many things in the shape of wanting to know what our Governors will do, or who the next Prime Minister is likely to be, or what laws affecting us are likely to be passed.21 — Mahatma Gandhi

In the days of peace every precaution should be taken to insure that there are no forces making for war. Just as we now forbid the trafficking in certain drugs, in the sale of poisons, just as we forbid the making of any imprint that suggests a coin or currency, just as experience has demonstrated that men may not make profit out of certain things because of the danger of abuse, so in the gravest of all dangers laws should be passed taking from those who might gain from war or preparations for war every hope that advantage could come to them by such a calamity. — Frederic C. Howe

If you are truly convinced that there is some solution to all human problems, that one can conceive an ideal society which men can reach if only they do what is necessary to attain it, then you and your followers must believe that no price can be too high to pay in order to open the gates of such a paradise. Only the stupid and malevolent will resist once certain simple truths are put to them. Those who resist must be persuaded; if they cannot be persuaded, laws must be passed to restrain them; if that does not work, then coercion, if need be violence, will inevitably have to be used - if necessary, terror, slaughter. — Isaiah Berlin

The first man who said "fire burns" was employing scientific method, at any rate if he had allowed himself to be burnt several times. This man had already passed through the two stages of observation and generalization. He had not, however, what scientific technique demands-a careful choice of significant facts on the one hand, and, on the other hand, various means of arriving at laws otherwise than my mere generalization. — Bertrand Russell

The job of the Attorney General is very specific. My roll, as the legal adviser, is to defend the constitutionality of the laws as they're passed. — Jeffrey Chiesa

The president of the United States, on Inauguration Day, takes an oath to faithfully execute the laws. Those are the laws that are passed by Congress. — Jim Sensenbrenner

Congress has repeatedly passed laws and otherwise raised a ruckus about indecent language on the broadcast airwaves used for radio and television. — Reed Hundt

I meet millions who tell me that they feel demoralized by the decay around us. The hope that each of us has is not in who governs us, or what laws are passed ... Our hope is in the power of God working in the hearts of people ... — Charles Colson

Nature exists without any laws, t has its own intrinsic laws, but they are not passed by man. They don't need your sanction; they are there, and life goes on following them — Osho

When states like Alabama and Arizona passed some of the harshest immigration laws in history, my Attorney General took them on in court and we won. — Barack Obama

We are aware that it is said, that woman is virtually represented in Parliament, her interests being the same as those of man; but the many laws, which have been obliged to be passed to protect them from their nearest male relatives, are a sufficient answer ... They are evidently the production of men legislating for their own most obvious interest ... without the slightest reference to the injustice they were committing against women. — Marion Kirkland Reid

If it has been revealed to man that the Almighty made him out of the dust of the earth, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, it is in vain to tell a Christian that man was originally a speck of albumen, and passed through the stages of monads and monkeys, before he attained his present intellectual preeminence. If it be a received truth that the Creator has repeatedly interposed in the government of the universe and displayed his immediate agency in miraculous interpositions, it is an insult to any reader to tell him that the being slumbers on his throne and rules under a "primal arrangement in his counsels," and "by a code of laws of unbending operation. — David Brewster

I've written and passed laws to give Medicare beneficiaries access to life saving cancer drugs and to ensure that seniors don't have to give up the prospect of a cure when they go into hospice care. — Ron Wyden

Jackson busied himself with the volunteers as they passed out flyers about the new voter ID laws that would go into effect in 2016 and signed up people to drive voters to the polls. Many of the elderly people they spoke to that morning were angry. — Cheris Hodges

There must be a lot of duplication in our country's laws," said Dukhi. "Every time there are elections, they talk of passing the same ones passed twenty years ago. Someone should remind them they need to apply the laws."
"For politicians, passing laws is like passing water," said Narayan. "It all ends down the drain. — Rohinton Mistry

Who is to blame? The filth peddler, of course, but even more than this vulgar entertainer, the filth consumer, the public. So long as men are corrupt and revel in sewer filth, entertainers will sell them what they want. Laws may be passed, arrests may be made, lawyers may argue, courts may sentence and jails may harbor men of corrupt minds, but pornography and allied insults to decency will never cease until men have cleansed their minds and cease to require and pay for such vile stuff. When the customer is sick and tired of being drowned in filth by the comedians, he will not pay for that filth and its source will dry up. — Spencer W. Kimball

And, inevitably, like the iron and the magnet with sweet obedience to their precise, immutable laws, I poured myself into her. There was no pink ticket, there were no calculations, there was no One State, there was no me. There were only gentle, sharp, clenched teeth and there were gold eyes thrown wide open to me- and through them I slowly went inside, deeper and deeper still. And silence- except in the corner, thousands of miles away, where drops were dripping into the sink. I was the universe, and eras and epochs passed as drop followed drop ... — Yevgeny Zamyatin

One hundred and fifty years ago the vacant lands of the West were opened to private use. One hundred years ago the Congress passed the Homestead Act, probably the single greatest stimulus to national development ever enacted. Under the impetus of that Act and other laws, more than 1.1 billion acres of the original public main have been transferred to private and non-federal public ownership. The 768 million acres remaining in federal ownership are a valuable national asset. — John F. Kennedy

The government passed more laws to protect women from dirty jokes than to protect men from death by faulty rafters at a construction site. — Warren Farrell

Seventy-six percent of the American people say we have a spiritual problem in our country. That's great, because now they understand the root of the problem is not that we haven't passed enough laws; rather, the root of the problem is in terms of our social value system. — Charles Colson

Nothing in this world is hidden forever. The gold which has lain for centuries unsuspected in the ground, reveals itself one day on the surface. Sand turns traitor, and betrays the footstep that has passed over it; water gives back to the tell-tale surface the body that has been drowned. Fire itself leaves the confession, in ashes, of the substance consumed in it. Hate breaks its prison-secrecy in the thoughts, through the doorway of the eyes; and Love finds the Judas who betrays it by a kiss. Look where we will, the inevitable law of revelation is one of the laws of nature: the lasting preservation of a secret is a miracle which the world has never yet seen. — Wilkie Collins

The dream of the Convention was born from the that children and their needs were not been considered when policies were being made, laws passed or actions undertaken. — Carol Bellamy

A part of me understands the need to keep order, but another part worries that we are being led to fear the wrong things. It's just like Chinatown and all the laws passed to contain us. We were never the enemy. The enemy was our country's own fear. — Stacey Lee

Despots are elected and deposed.
Laws are passed and repealed.
Nations rise and fall.
Individual liberty is eternal. — A.E. Samaan

Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun. — Kurt Vonnegut

life in the free world is somehow supposed to improve? These are the real casualties of our wars. The war on drugs. The war on crime. Unintended victims of tough laws passed by tough politicians over the past forty years. One million young black men now warehoused in decaying prisons, idling away the days at taxpayer expense. — John Grisham

All genuine progress results from finding new facts. No law can be passed to make an acre yield three hundred bushels. God has already established the laws. It is four us to discover them, and to learn the facts by which we can obey them. — Wheeler McMillen

The Constitution guarantees protection to property, and we must make that promise good. But it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation. It is necessary that laws should be passed to prohibit the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for political purposes; it is still more necessary that such laws should be thoroughly enforced. — Theodore Roosevelt

This [minimum wage] legislation, passed by the 81st Congress at its first session, is an important addition to the laws we live by. It is a measure dictated by social justice. It adds to our economic strength. It is founded on the belief that full human dignity requires at least a minimum level of economic sufficiency and security. — Harry S. Truman

One of the reasons that the Senate was structured and founded the way it is, as opposed to the House, it was designed for gridlock. It was designed to stop massive new laws being passed and voted on daily. It was designed to stop the growth of government. — Rush Limbaugh

Practically, administrative agencies often work out of the public's eye to implement the laws passed by Congress and the executive orders signed by the president. — Joel B. Teitelbaum

All civilization in a sense exists only in the mind. Gunpowder, textile arts, machinery, laws, telephones are not themselves transmitted from man to man or from generation to generation, at least not permanently. It is the perception, the knowledge and understanding of them, their ideas in the Platonic sense, that are passed along. Everything social can have existence only through mentality. — Alfred L. Kroeber

At first they pretended to laugh to scorn the idea of animals managing a farm for themselves. The whole thing would be over in a fortnight, they said. They put it about that the animals on the Manor Farm (they insisted on calling it the Manor Farm; they would not tolerate the name "Animal Farm") were perpetually fighting among themselves and were
also rapidly starving to death. When time passed and the animals had evidently not starved to death, Frederick and Pilkington changed their
tune and began to talk of the terrible wickedness that now flourished on Animal Farm. It was given out that the nimals there practised cannibalism, tortured one another with red-hot horseshoes, and had their females in
common. This was what came of rebelling against the laws of Nature, Frederick and Pilkington said. — George Orwell

Since 2010, when the GOP took control of many State legislatures, 205 anti-abortion laws have been enacted. This is more laws of this ilk than were passed in the prior decade.16 Since 2010 more than 50 abortion providers in 27 States have ended service, though not all were due to legislation. — David A. Grimes, M.D.

America didn't have a drug problem before it passed drug laws. — L. Neil Smith

Another way in which religion betrays itself, and attempts to escape mere reliance on faith and instead offer "evidence" in the sense normally understood, is by the argument from revelation. On certain very special occasions, it is asserted, the divine will was made known by direct contact with randomly selected human beings, who were supposedly vouchsafed unalterable laws that could then be passed on to those less favored. — Christopher Hitchens

I am of the opinion that all who can should vote for the most intelligent, honest, and conscientious men eligible to office, irrespective of former party opinions, who will endeavour to make the new constitutions and the laws passed under them as beneficial as possible to the true interests, prosperity, and liberty of all classes and conditions of the people. — Robert E.Lee

More and more Congressmen now stay in Washington all year-round because they can't stay at home under the laws they've passed. — Sam Levenson

The 112th Congress passed only 220 laws, the lowest number enacted by any Congress. In 1948, when President Truman called the 80th Congress a 'Do-Nothing' Congress, it had passed more than 900 laws. — Juan Williams

Monsieur, if a wife's nature loathes that of the man she is wedded to, marriage must be slavery. Against slavery all right thinkers revolt, and though torture be the price of resistance, torture must be dared: though the only road to freedom lie through the gates of death, those gates must be passed; for freedom is indispensable. Then, monsieur, I would resist as far as my strength permitted; when that strength failed I should be sure of a refuge. Death would certainly screen me both from bad laws and their consequences. — Charlotte Bronte

The new laws passed by Congress in the name of fighting terrorism pose a greater danger to the civil liberties of American citizens than to the operations of terrorists. Powers once assumed are never relinquished, just as bureaucracies, once created, never die. — Charley Reese

Few legislators who passed these mental health laws realized that (Brock) Chisholm and his associates defined mental illness as a sense of loyalty to a particular nation, a sense of loyalty to a moral code, and strict adherence to concepts of right and wrong. Chisholm has been obsessed for years with the idea that instilling concepts of right and wrong, love of country and morality in children by their parents is the paramount evil. — John A. Stormer

Many American boys that fought in WWII had been sterilized under eugenic laws passed by the the United States Supreme Court under the 1927 case of Buck v. Bell. Over 80,000 Americans would be forcibly sterilized under that legal precedent. Coincidentally, Buck v Bell is also the legal precedent cited in Roe v. Wade, the famous abortion rights case. — A.E. Samaan

All too often the people of our culture think they're really doing something if they're out there fighting bad things and getting laws passed. Just look at what we've accomplished by outlawing drugs and waging a trillion-dollar War on Drugs! (Nothing!) — Daniel Quinn

The wisdom of the masses is not always wise. You could put a lot of things to a vote-you could have put anti-miscegenation laws to a vote, and that would have passed pretty handily. Either all people are created equal-or they're not. You're either buying into the original premise of America-or you're not. — Jon Stewart

The best man, then, must legislate, and laws must be passed, but these laws will have no authority when they miss the mark, though in all other cases retaining their authority. But when the law cannot determine a point at all, or not well, should the one best man or should all decide? According to our present practice assemblies meet, sit in judgment, deliberate, and decide, and their judgments an relate to individual cases. Now any member of the assembly, taken separately, is certainly inferior to the wise man. But the state is made up of many individuals. And as a feast to which all the guests contribute is better than a banquet furnished by a single man, so a multitude is a better judge of many things than any individual. — Aristotle.

Laws which prescribe what everyone must believe, and forbid men to say or write anything against this or that opinion, are often passed to gratify, or rather to appease the anger of those who cannot abide independent minds. — Baruch Spinoza

First, this law - the National Defense Education Act - ended years and years of debate about one controversial question: 'Shall the Federal Government, with all its massive resources, get directly involved in aiding American education?' The answer this law gave was a loud 'Yes!' - and thus we paved the way for a new era of support for education in America. This law, in fact, helped make possible more than 50 new education laws passed in my administration. — Lyndon B. Johnson

Then it was that were passed the laws restricting emancipation and prohibiting education. — Henry Charles Carey

Civil rights laws were not passed to protect the rights of white men and do not apply to them. — Mary Frances Berry

So the life of the philosopher extends widely: he is not confined by the same boundary as are others. He alone is free from the laws that limit the human race, and all ages serve him as though he were a god. Some time has passed: he grasps it in his recollection. Time is present: he uses it. Time is to come: he anticipates it. This combination of all times into one gives him a long life. — Seneca.

After Obama's victory, 395 new voting restrictions were introduced in 49 states from 2011 to 2015. Following the Tea Party's triumph in the 2010 elections, half the states in the country, nearly all of them under Republican control - from Texas to Wisconsin to Pennsylvania - passed laws making it harder to vote. The sudden escalation of efforts to curb voting rights most closely resembled the Redemption period that ended Reconstruction, when every southern state adopted devices like literacy tests and poll taxes to disenfranchise African-American voters. — Ari Berman

Reconciliation is a special budget procedure to change entitlement and tax laws. It cannot be filibustered and requires only a simple majority in the Senate to be passed. It is primarily intended for deficit and mandatory spending reduction. — Jeff Miller

Under our constitutional system, the executive executes the laws that Congress has passed. It should not be executing laws that Congress has rejected. — Charles Krauthammer

Usurpers always bring about or select troublous times to get passed, under cover of the public terror, destructive laws, which the people would never adopt in cold blood. The moment chosen is one of the surest means of distinguishing the work of the legislator from that of the tyrant. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Where is the hope? I meet millions who tell me that they feel demoralized by the decay around us. Where is the hope? The hope that each of us have is not in who governs us, or what laws are passed, or what great things that we do as a nation. Our hope is in the power of God working through the hearts of people, and that's where our hope is in this country; that's where our hope is in life. — Steven Curtis Chapman

We passed important laws to give the authorities responsible for investigation wide powers to defend us. — George Pataki

Armed and law-abiding citizens are a greater deterrent to violent crime than 1,000 laws passed by Congress. — Rick Perry

Columbus and his successors were not coming into an empty wilderness, but into a world which in some places was as densely populated as Europe itself, where the culture was complex, where human relations were more egalitarian than in Europe, and where the relations among men, women, children, and nature were more beautifully worked out than perhaps any place in the world. They were people without a written language, but with their own laws, their poetry, their history kept in memory and passed on, in an oral vocabulary more complex than Europe's, accompanied by song, dance, and ceremonial drama. They paid careful attention to the development of personality, intensity of will, independence and flexibility, passion and potency, to their partnership with one another and with nature. — Howard Zinn

Laws are getting passed in states like Alabama that basically would punish American citizens who are 'harboring' people. Since the federal government hasn't been able to muster or to get comprehensive immigration reform passed, states are taking it upon themselves to police and enforce laws. — Jose Antonio Vargas

Members of the legislature, people who have run for office, know the connection between money and influence on what laws get passed — Ruth Bader Ginsburg

All laws for the purpose of making man worship God, are born of the same spirit that kindled the fires of the auto da fe, and lovingly built the dungeons of the Inquisition. All laws defining and punishing blasphemy - making it a crime to give your honest ideas about the Bible, or to laugh at the ignorance of the ancient Jews, or to enjoy yourself on the Sabbath, or to give your opinion of Jehovah, were passed by impudent bigots, and should be at once repealed by honest men. An infinite God ought to be able to protect himself, without going in partnership with State Legislatures. — Robert Green Ingersoll

Environmental laws were not passed to protect our air and water, they were passed to get votes. — Frank Zappa