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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.

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.

It is the knowledge that all men have weaknesses and that many have vices that makes government necessary.

A government of laws, and not of men.

Tyranny naturally arises out of democracy.

Democracy is the form of government that gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.

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.

There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all crime mean and ugly.