Legislation Quotes

“Those who would legislate against the teaching of evolution should also legislate against gravity, electricity and the unreasonable velocity of light, and also should introduce a clause to prevent the use of the telescope, the microscope and the spectroscope or any other instrument of precision which may in the future be invented, constructed or used for the discovery of truth.”

“The world is not going to be saved by legislation.”

“When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.”

“Revealed religion is one thing, revealed legislation, another.”

“nothing, on the other hand, can be more impenetrable to the uninitiated than a legislation founded upon precedents.”

“What then is the relation of law to morality? Law cannot prescribe morality, it can prescribe only external actions and therefore it should prescribe only those actions whose mere fulfillment, from whatever motive, the state adjudges to be conducive to welfare. What actions are these? Obviously such actions as promote the physical and social conditions requisite for the expression and development of free—or moral—personality.... Law does not and cannot cover all the ground of morality. To turn all moral obligations into legal obligations would be to destroy morality. Happily it is impossible. No code of law can envisage the myriad changing situations that determine moral obligations. Moreover, there must be one legal code for all, but moral codes vary as much as the individual characters of which they are the expression. To legislate against the moral codes of one’s fellows is a very grave act, requiring for its justification the most indubitable and universally admitted of social gains, for it is to steal their moral codes, to suppress their characters.”

“we ask for too much salvation by legislation. All we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse. (quoting Joel Salatin)”

“When a judge assumes the power to decide which distinctions made in a statute are legitimate and which are not, he assumes the power to disapprove of any and all legislation, because all legislation makes distinctions.”

“I’m an atheist, and a militant atheist when religion starts impacting on legislation.”

“A mistake that a lot of us have made, related to those who advocate for gun safety legislation, is that we try to process it through our legislative bodies, and that's where the NRA's strength lies.”