A. V. Dicey famous quotes

The beneficial effect of state intervention, especially in the form of legislation, is direct, immediate, and so to speak, visible, while its evil effects are gradual and indirect and lay out of sight ... Hence the majority of mankind must almost of necessity look with undue favor upon governmental intervention.
-- A. V. Dicey

#Sight #Evil #Liberty

Our constitution, in short, is a judge-made constitution, and it bears on its face all the features, good and bad, of judge-made law.
-- A. V. Dicey

#Law #Judging #Faces

The principle of Parliamentary sovereignty means neither more nor less than this, namely, that Parliament thus defined has, under the English constitution, the right to make or unmake any law whatever; and, further, that no person or body is recognised by the law of England as having a right to override or set aside the legislation of Parliament.
-- A. V. Dicey

#Mean #Law #Principles

Freedom of discussion is in England little else than the right to write or say anything which a jury of twelve shopkeepers think it expedient should be said or written.
-- A. V. Dicey

#Writing #Thinking #Insulting

Considered as a mere question of physics, (and keeping all moral considerations entirely out of sight,) the appearance of man is a geological phenomenon of vast importance, indirectly modifying the whole surface of the earth, breaking in upon any supposition of zoological continuity, and utterly unaccounted for by what we have any right to call the laws of nature.

For there is no defense for a man who, in the excess of his wealth, has kicked the great altar of Justice out of sight.

Now you see. We are all fugitives. We have always been fugitives from the void. Whatever comfort, whatever power we gain from outside of ourselves diminishes us -- because comfort and power, unless they are won from the void inside of us, are illusions that make us forget the emptyness that carries us. When we forget that, we believe we deserve comfort and power and so are capable of any evil. We deserve nothing but what we make of ourselves. We deserve nothing else. And when we understand that, then nothing is enough.

Mischief and malice grow on the same branch of the tree of evil.

When the inward is good the outward is also inevitably so, for the outward always follows the inward, whether good or evil.

Perhaps worse still is what liberal societies might do to themselves in the face of this new and different threat [of terrorism]. They begin, by small but dangerous increments, to cease to be as liberal as they once were. They begin to restrict their own hard-won rights and freedoms as a protection against the crminial minority who attempt (and as we thus see, by forcing liberty to commit suidcide, succed in doing) to terrorise society.

The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty. Plainly, the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of liberty.

The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty

What has ever threatened our liberty and prosperity save and except this institution of Slavery?

We will not let terrorists change our way of life; we will not live in fear; and we will not undermine the civil liberties that characterize our Democracy.