Oppressive Laws Quotes

All restraints upon man's natural liberty, not necessary for the simple maintenance of justice, are of the nature of slavery, and differ from each other only in degree.

Laws directed against opinions affect the generous-minded rather than the wicked, and are adapted less for coercing criminals than for irritating the upright.

Terror is trump. Common, brutal suppression methods are considered as sanctified laws. "Old Fighters" are holy ones. From the district leader upwards there are only Gods!

Whether the authorities be invaders or merely local tyrants, the effect of such [gun control] laws is to place the individual at the mercy of the state, unable to resist.

Here in America, just as we see such incredible progress happening in one state, we see another state passing absolutely disgusting and oppressive laws against the rights of all sorts of people - transgender people, gay people, women.

The mission of law is not to oppress persons and plunder them of their property, even thought the law may be acting in a philanthropic spirit. Its mission is to protect property.

Whenever regulation increases, personal freedom decreases.

Laws that oppress people have no moral authority.

Formerly we suffered from crimes; now we suffer from laws.

The more laws that governments pass, the less individual freedom there is. Any student of history will tell you that. Totalitarian countries ban pretty much everything.

I believe we have more to fear from the potential of that bill passing than we do from any terrorist right now in any country.

Skeptical friends, you who have stoutly maintained that there never would be any attempt in this Government to unite church and state, and that no oppressive Sunday laws would ever be here enacted, what have you to say to these things?

Repeal all laws which assume that mankind is a herd of cattle

If the jury have no right to judge of the justice of a law of the government, they plainly can do nothing to protect the people against the oppressions of the government; for there are no oppressions which the government may not authorize by law.

Accursed be the city where the laws would stifle nature's!

It was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read.

What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long.

Mr. President, passage of this bill will visit the heel of oppression on all the people, vitiate their constitutional shield against tyranny, and materially hasten the destruction of the best design for self-government yet devised by the minds of men. Its passage will mark one of the darkest days in history

Liberty is the soul's right to breathe and, when it cannot take a long breath, laws are girdled too tight.

Then it was that were passed the laws restricting emancipation and prohibiting education.

There has been no clearer principle of English or American constitutional law than that, in criminal cases, it is not only the power and duty of juries to judge what are the facts, what is the law, and what is the moral intent of the accused; but that it is also their power, and their primary and paramount duty, to judge the justice of the law, and to hold all laws invalid, that are, in their opinion, unjust or oppressive, and find all persons guiltless in violating, or resisting the execution of, such laws.

[Japanese] ordinances regulated every aspect of life in Formosa. They were, and are, extremely galling to the Chinese population, for the Chinese are individualists who put personal liberty among the first of the desiderata of life.

In any event, any person from 2.0 down on the Tone Scale should not have, in any thinking society, any civil rights of any kind, because by abusing those rights he brings into being arduous and strenuous laws which are oppressive to those who need no such restraints.

It has always seemed to me that the social order was implicit in the very nature of things, and required nothing more from the human spirit than care in arranging the various elements; that a people could be governed without being made thralls or libertines or victims thereby; that man was born for peace and liberty, and became miserable and cruel only through the action of insidious and oppressive laws. And I believe therefore that if man be given laws which harmonize with the dictates of nature and of his heart he will cease to be unhappy and corrupt.