John Marshall Harlan quotes

  • In keeping people straight, principle is not as powerful as a policeman.

  • The single most powerful element of youth is that you don't have the life experiences to know what can't be done.

  • Dreams dress us carefully in the colors of power and faith.

  • All true religion, all true morality, all true mysticism have but one object, and that is to act on humanity, collective and individual, in such a manner that it shall correspond efficiently with the great law of development, and co-operate consciously therewith to achieve the end of development.

  • A poem generated by its own laws may be unrealized and bad in terms of so-called objective principles of taste, judgement, deduction.

  • Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take.

  • What makes sense is not law, syntax, rules or structure

  • There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.

  • Expedience, not justice, is the rule of contemporary American law.

  • How accurately can the law fix the crime? There has to be a mechanism for very fast action. The law is like this: catch them and punish them.

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