Legislators Quotes

“Legislators and revolutionaries who promise equality and liberty at the same time, are either psychopaths or mountebanks.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections

“Our legislators have not yet learned the comparative value of free-trade and of freedom, of union, and of rectitude, to a nation. They have no genius or talent for comparatively humble questions of taxation and finance, commerce and manufacturers and agriculture.

Nuestros legisladores no han aprendido todavía el valor comparativo del libre cambio y la libertad, la unión y la rectitud hacia la nación. No tienen genio ni talento para hacerse preguntas humildes sobre impuestos y finanzas, comercio, manufactura y agricultura.”
― Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

“If life was fair ... one third of the people would comprise of judges and lawyers ... one third of police and prison officials ... and one third of legislators ... and one third more to make the other three thirds make any sense at all .... Thank goodness for no fair.”
― Brian Spellman

“No man with a genius for legislation has appeared in America. They are rare in the history of the world. There are orators, politicians, and eloquent men, by the thousand; but the speaker has not yet opened his mouth to speak, who is capable of settling the much-vexed questions of the day. We love eloquence for its own sake, and not for any truth which it may utter, or any heroism it may inspire.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

“But in general the people who I think would be moved by art, moved to change legislation, don't read novels, don't read poems, and don't really care that someone's written a book about a place like Dozier.”
― Colson Whitehead

“In the Congress of the United States, Cromwell had known a good many men who were possessed of absolute certainty, and this he feared so much that he felt the only real and enduring evil on the face of the earth was unbending certainty, unshakable orthodoxy.”
― Howard Fast, The Dinner Party

“A Locrian who proposed any new law stood forth in the assembly of the people with a cord round his neck, and if the law was rejected, the innovator was instantly strangled.”
― Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

“An individual who delights at all in the beauty of language does well to avoid becoming an attorney or a legislator.”
― Ron Bracjub

“An individual who delights at all in the beauty of language does well to avoid becoming an attorney or a legislator.”
― Ron Brackin