It is the besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which the masses of men exhibit their tyranny.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
It is a besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which masses of men exhibit their tyranny.
It is the knowledge that all men have weaknesses and that many have vices that makes government necessary.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
Whenever men take the law into their own hands, the loser is the law. And when the law loses, freedom languishes.
The allegiance of the citizen, in the only sense in which the word can be tolerated in a republic, is due to the law. What idea other men may have of a law higher than the supreme law, I know not. Like the notion of the Stoics concerning Fate, it is perfectly incomprehensible.
A government of laws, and not of men.
Democracy is the form of government that gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.
It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd.
The law, which restrains a man from doing mischief to his fellow citizens, though it diminishes the natural, increases the civil liberty of mankind.
It is not infrequent to hear men declaim loudly upon liberty, who, if we may judge by the whole tenor of their actions, mean nothing else by it but their own liberty - to oppress without control, or the restraint of laws, all who are poorer and weaker than themselves.
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