Emanuel Celler Quotes

Parliament itself would not exist in its present form had people not defied the law.

Former good legislators have erred, and those of the best polity may err again, and enact laws which ought to be disobeyed and resisted.

A country, people, and society are in a sorry state when the guardians of its democratic values and the rule of law are the officers of the armed forces who are forced to stand up to the mob and the politicians who incite it and kowtow to it.

Our system of checks and balances .... The people keep the politicians from stealing too much, and the politicians keep the people from getting too crazy.

Law that is sufficiently complex is indistinguishable from lawlessness.

It is ingrained into our national life that the rule of law makes us free.

Here in America we work out our differences, not with civil wars, but with spirited elections. We resolve our disputes, not through acts of violence but through the rule of law. And we preserve and protect our system of justice best when we accept its judgments that we disagree with the most.

For over 200 years, this nation has adhered to the rule of law with unparalleled success. A shift to a nation based on extra-constitutional authority is prohibited, as well as ill-advised.

The great constitutional corrective in the hands of the people against usurpation of power, or corruption by their agents is the right of suffrage…

Unless the mass retains sufficient control over those entrusted with the powers of their government, these will be perverted to their own oppression, and to the perpetuation of wealth and power in the individuals and their families selected for the trust. Whether our Constitution has hit on the exact degree of control necessary, is yet under experiment

...no country can be well governed unless its citizens as a body keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians of the law and that the law officers are only the machinery for its execution, nothing more.

From my viewpoint it's the Clinton gang who are the outlaws, the violators of our Constitution and of all of our old-fashioned legal and moral principles, and anything that we do to oppose them is legal and is morally justified. Anyone who goes along with them is a traitor, in the strict, old-fashioned sense of the word, and anyone who sits on his hands now and refuses to oppose the Clinton gang is not much better.

We have institutions, but they don’t work. We have laws, but they must be enforced.

The U. S. Government tends to be vindictive in these cases when it comes to people who have exposed their wrongdoing. U. S. political Officials who … violate the Constitution of the United States—they get promotions; the people who expose them, like Mr Snowden, get indictments.

I became more set than ever in my distrust of those men, whether businessmen or lawyers, judges, legislators or executive officers, who seek to make the Constitution a fetish for the prevention of the work of social reform..

The right to defy an unconstitutional statute is basic ….

The only legitimacy we have is the law—not what politicians tell you …. The legal system in this country is what distinguishes us from every other attempt at Republican Democracy that failed.

Never has law and order been so disdained.

Is it possible to tolerate the state order being undermined from morning to night because doing so is supposedly a democratic obligation.

Democracy destroys itself because it abuses its right to freedom and equality. Because it teaches its citizens to consider audacity as a right, lawlessness as a freedom, abrasive speech as equality, and anarchy as progress.

It is a fundamental principle of democracy that citizens obey the law or incur whatever penalty applies to its breaking.

We are a country of laws. When you take that away, the consequences are enormous.

It's said that history inevitably marches toward democracy, but it only leaves the possibility of democracy, and the constant threat that it would be eroded by big money.

We don't want the government to have anything we don't have, because government isn't 'We The People' anymore.

No one has done more to advance the rule of law than President Trump.