Quotes About Legislation

Every culture has blasphemy laws. They are not always called that, but no society allows citizens to rail against the reigning deity. In our pluralistic times, these blasphemy laws are called "hate crimes" legislation, among other euphemisms, but they are really religious protections to keep the reigning god, demos, from being blasphemed.

As it is an ancient truth that freedom cannot be legislated into existence, so it is no less obvious that freedom cannot be censored into existence.

We have never stopped sin by passing laws; and in the same way, we are not going to take a great moral ideal and achieve it merely by law.

There ought to be one day - just one - when there is open season on senators.

Give no bounties: make equal laws: secure life and prosperity and you need not give alms.

Instead, the legislature passed new laws banning the teaching of slaves to read and write, and prohibiting, too, teaching slaves about the Bible.43 In a nation founded on a written Declaration, made sacred by evangelicals during a religious revival, reading about equality became a crime.

The final conclusion I've made is that we, the people, must decide what comes next. The events of the past decade have brought to the public fore a fairly widespread recognition that certain speech is beyond the pale, but in nearly every instance I have seen, regulatory and legislative proposals to restrict such speech take the wrong aim, punishing companies (and their workers) for errors, or for not moving fast enough, while failing to do anything to address the problems at the root.

This Congress is simply not doing its job under Republican leadership.

Since the day he came into office, President Bush has worked to gut more than 34 years of hard work by weakening many of our Nation's standing environmental laws, some of which were signed into law by his father.

prior to the 1968 Gun Control Act, any person could legally own all sorts of weapons, including machine guns. Yet these guns prompted no school shootings. What

In twenty-first-century America, many thoughtful persons have witnessed what appears to be a recycling of the events of pre–World War II Germany: the destruction of a prominent national structure; rushed emergency legislation; the rise of a secretive national security apparatus; attempts to register both firearms and people, coupled with preemptive wars of aggression propelled by fervent nationalism

The achievement of this goal will require a major war, a world war, starting most likely from the impending US-Israel attack on Iran. But to wage this war the US must be transformed into a genuine dictatorship. Legislation carried out in the wake of [the] Oklahoma bombing and 9/11 has ensured that the US public lives in constant fear of being arrested.

In a sad twist of fate, the bill to reauthorize the Patriot Act was debated on the floor of the House of Representatives the same day that terrorists struck again.

The old welfare system was hurting people by discouraging work and marriage. Welfare reform, and now this legislation, will build on the understanding that work and strong families are the foundation upon which we build our future.

Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself; and where they are, they should be changed. Nowhere is this more clear than in the laws against possession of marijuana in private for personal use... Therefore, I support legislation amending Federal law to eliminate all Federal criminal penalties for the possession of up to one ounce [28g] of marijuana.

State legislative and administrative bodies are not field offices of the national bureaucracy," she wrote. A quarter century later, her view was generally that of the majority.

We have the best congressmen that money can buy.

Yet the British group did not have the legislative focus of the Germans. 'We do not think', they declared, 'the time has yet arrived in England for a similar demand to be made

government policy.

Laws are sometimes put on the books not for purposes of strict enforcement but as statements about the community's values.

It is a well-documented fact that pornography as a separate category did not exist until the nine-tenth century, when lawmakers throughout Europe ostensibly sought to protect a predominantly white, middle-class female population from sexually explicit material and - by extension - knowledge of their own sexuality.

Why keep on enacting laws when we already have more than we can break

There are always too many Democratic congressmen, too many Republican congressmen, and never enough U.S. congressmen.

For every action there is an equal and opposite government program.