People crushed by law have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws.
Thomas Babington MacaulayRead
To punish a man because we infer from the nature of some doctrine which he holds, or from the conduct of other persons who hold the same doctrines with him, that he will commit a crime, is persecution, and is, in every case, foolish and wicked.
Interpretation
Punishing someone based on assumptions about their beliefs or the actions of others is unjust and immoral.
This quote highlights the dangers of guilt by association and the fallacy of assuming that a person's beliefs will lead them to commit wrongful acts. Macaulay warns that such persecution not only undermines justice but also reveals a foolishness in our reasoning, suggesting we should judge individuals based on their actions rather than their affiliations or doctrines.
In practice
During a discussion on freedom of speech, one might reference this quote to emphasize the importance of understanding individual beliefs without prejudice.
People crushed by law have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws.
There is only one cure for the evils which newly acquired freedom produces, and that cure is freedom.
Such night in England ne'er had been, nor ne'er again shall be.
The highest proof of virtue is to possess boundless power without abusing it.
That is the best government which desires to make the people happy, and knows how to make them happy.
We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.
It was like that all the time, in those years: an endless trip, a gaudy voyage. But powers decay. Time leaches the colors from the best of visions. The world becomes grayer. Entropy beats us down. Everything fades. Everything goes. Everything dies.
Absence and death are the same - only that in death there is no suffering.
For when is death not within our selves? And as Heracleitus says: “Living and dead are the same, and so are awake and asleep, young and old. The former when shifted are the latter, and again the latter when shifted are the former."
Long live the weeds that overwhelm_x000D_ _x000D_ My narrow vegetable realm!_x000D_ _x000D_ The bitter rock, the barren soil_x000D_ _x000D_ That force the son of man to toil;_x000D_ _x000D_ All things unholy, marred by curse,_x000D_ _x000D_ The ugly of the universe.
We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of time and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible in life, as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom.
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