Domestic Relations Quotes

The vilest malefactor has some wretched woman tied to him, against whom he can commit any atrocity except killing her, and, if tolerably cautious, can do that without much danger of the legal penalty.

In domestic as in political tyranny, the case of absolute monsters chiefly illustrates the institution by showing that there is scarcely any horror which may not occur under it if the despot pleases

I shall recommend … uniform laws … for all of the States, and especially for marriage, divorce, and the limitations of contracts, and such a regulation of the laws of descent and distribution of estates as will make the wife equal with the husband in authority and right, and an equal partner in the common business.

No slave is a slave to the same lengths, and in so full a sense of the word, as a wife is. Hardly any slave, except one immediately attached to the master's person, is a slave at all hours and all minutes

Ah! how annoying that the law doesn't allow a woman to change husbands just as one does shirts.

Of all the horrid brutalities of our age, I know of none so horrid as those that are sanctioned and defended by marriage. Night after night, there are thousands of rapes committed, under cover of this accursed license; and millions—yes I say it boldly, knowing whereof I speak—millions of poor, heart-broken, suffering wives are compelled to minister to the lechery of insatiable husbands, when every instinct of body and sentiment of soul revolts in lathing and disgust....

However the Southern man may have been master of the negro, there were compensatory processes whereby certain negroes were masters of their masters' children.

I think it was in 1971 or 1974, the Supreme Court ruled marriage is not a subject that the federal government can exercise jurisdiction over, including the courts. To do that, we would need an amendment to the Constitution.

The family is a court of justice which never shuts down for night or day.

A primary motivation for introducing no-fault divorce was, in fact, to reduce perjury in the legal system.

Marriage has historically been in the domain of the States to regulate.

When the blood of our citizens, shed by a British soldiery, had stained our streets, and flowed upon the heights which surround us, and sunk into the earth upon the plains of Lexington and Concord, then when he, whose name can never be pronounced by American lips without the strongest emotion of gratitude and love to every American heart--when he, that slaveholder, who from this canvass smiles upon you, his children, with paternal benignity, came with other slaveholders to drive the British myrmidons from this city, and in this hall, our fathers did not refuse to hold communion with them. "With slaveholders they formed the Confederation, neither asking nor receiving any right to interfere in their domestic relations; with them they made the Declaration of Independence

This Court repeatedly has recognized that the whole subject of the domestic relations of husband and wife belongs to the laws of the States and not to the laws of the United States.

Whether the institution to be defended is slavery, political absolutism, or the absolutism of the head of a family, we are always expected to judge of it from its best instances; and we are presented with pictures of loving exercise of authority on one side, loving submission to it on the other

My dad once said that in criminal law you see terrible people on their best behavior; in family law you see great people on their worst behavior.

Can there be any doubt that a Bill of Rights that in time of peace bars soldiers from being quartered in a home without the consent of the owner should also bar the police from investigating the intimacies of the marriage relation?

The Emancipation Proclamation is predicated upon the idea that the President may so annul the constitutions and laws of sovereign states, overthrow their domestic relations, deprive loyal men of their property, and disloyal as well, without trial or condemnation.

We zero in on family as a theme because it makes the movies emotionally available to a universal audience.

Congress has no authority to interfere in the internal regulations of particular States, relative to the instruction of slaves in the principles of morality and religion; to their comfortable clothing and accommodations, and subsistence; to the regulation of their marriages, and the prevention of the violation of their rights thereof.

Dissolution and custody matters are the great equalizers. Having done this for a while, you do realize that everybody has the same issues. It doesn't matter how much money you have or how much power you have, you are always afraid you're never going to see your child.

A female slave has (in Christian countries) an admitted right, … to refuse to her master the last familiarity. Not so the wife: however brutal a tyrant she may unfortunately be chained to

The domestic relations precede, and in our present existence are worth more than all our other social ties. They give the first throb to the heart, and unseal the deep fountains of its love. Home is the chief school of human virtue. Its responsibilities, joys, sorrows, smiles, tears, hopes, and solicitudes form the chief interest of human life.

I researched children's rights, divorce law, and parental kidnapping. Millions of children and parents are touched by the inadequacy of the legal system to deal with the human heart.

Our relations with the other powers of the world are important, but still more important are our relations among ourselves.

I'd sue the bottom off my husband if he dared to put me in one of his films, and he knows that.