The clearest way to show what the rule of law means to us in everyday life is to recall what has happened when there is no rule of law.

Much of everyday life is filled with opportunities to be distracted. Our possessions… entertainment… cares and anxieties… and even the passionate desire and pursuit of things, some good and not so good, can keep our minds and hearts caught up in a flurry of activity.

I don’t have space to enter into the examples or the history of this, so I’m left with having to make the bold statement that culture is extinct.

An association of men who will not quarrel with one another is a thing which has never yet existed, from the greatest confederacy of nations down to a town meeting or a vestry.

I don’t know why women want any of the things men have when one of the things that women have is men.

I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them have it.

Governments are not representative. They have their own power, serving segments of the population that are dominant and rich.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions.

For any young democracy, the most difficult but important step is burying the legacy of tyranny and establishing an economy and a government and institutions that abide by the rule of law. Every country faces challenges to the rule of law, including my own.

There is no person in this room whose basic rights are not involved in any successful defiance to the carrying out of court orders.

I have observed that society in general always seems to honor its living conformists and its dead troublemakers.

I myself have been on my own and utterly independent since I graduated. I haven’t belonged to any company or any system. It isn’t easy to live like this in Japan.

Everybody’s journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.

I never leaf through a copy of National Geographic without realizing how lucky we are to live in a society where it is traditional to wear clothes.

No good is ever done to society by the pictorial representation of its diseases.

The very word ‚secrecy‘ is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings.

First, how do we give everyone a fair shot at opportunity and security in this new economy? Second, how do we make technology work for us, and not against us – especially when it comes to solving urgent challenges like climate change? Third, how do we keep America safe and lead the world without becoming its policeman?

Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of the day: rather, by so doing, it more completely realises for us that which we desire.

I started out in anthropology, so to me how society works, how people put themselves together and make things work, has always been a big interest.

Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.

Although the big word on the left is ‚compassion,‘ the big agenda on the left is dependency.

I’m trying to make God more relevant in our society.

Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.

Most men are individuals no longer so far as their business, its activities, or its moralities are concerned. They are not units but fractions.

What the Pope thinks of being gay does not matter to the world. It matters to the people who like the Pope and follow the Pope… It is not a reflection of all religious people.

When police or prosecutors conceal significant exculpatory or impeaching material, we hold, it is ordinarily incumbent on the state to set the record straight.

Every man, every woman who has to take up the service of government, must ask themselves two questions: ‚Do I love my people in order to serve them better? Am I humble and do I listen to everybody, to diverse opinions in order to choose the best path?‘ If you don’t ask those questions, your governance will not be good.

The jury consist of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.

Everybody is entertained to death.

There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families.

If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers.

To me, the black black woman is our essential mother, the blacker she is the more us she is and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people.

In America today, we are nearer a final triumph over poverty than is any other land.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.

Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.

It is pretty ironic that the so-called ‚least advanced‘ people are the ones taking the lead in trying to protect all of us, while the richest and most powerful among us are the ones who are trying to drive the society to destruction.

What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale.

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.

I get very little sleep when the court is sitting.

The mind of America is seized by a fatal dry rot – and it’s only a question of time before all that the mind controls will run amuck in a frenzy of stupid, impotent fear.

The moral disapprobation of society has an impact on behavior in societies.

Tyrants have always some slight shade of virtue; they support the laws before destroying them.

No man is good enough to govern another man without the other’s consent.

The best things and best people rise out of their separateness; I’m against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise.

In too much of the West, everyone wants the guarantee of safety, and never having to make any decisions.

That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings.

I’m not a reality-TV kind of guy. But it’s almost like we’re living in a reality show. Every day in this country, everybody keeps worrying about the deterioration of America, and it’s like a big reality show.

When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.

We don’t have to let extremists define us.

This country is being managed to death, being public related to death.

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

The American people have not become heartless.

The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced.

It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.

Optimism comes less easily today, not because democracy is less vigorous, but because democracy’s enemies have refined their instruments of repression.

Among a people generally corrupt liberty cannot long exist.

There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.

No man has any natural authority over his fellow men.

The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts.

Things in our country run in spite of government, not by aid of it.