People crushed by law have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that when people feel oppressed by laws, they may turn to power as their only source of hope and may resist those laws in return.
Thomas Babington Macaulay highlights the relationship between law and power, suggesting that individuals or groups who feel oppressed by the legal system often lose faith in the law and see power as their last refuge. When laws act as barriers to justice or fairness, those affected may become adversarial towards the very laws intended to govern them, indicating a cycle of conflict between power and legal authority.
In practice
This quote could be used in a courtroom debate about the fairness of the legal system.
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.
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.
You have a diasporic black world, and the only way to put it back together again is symbolic. It's like Humpty Dumpty. Whoever could edit the 'Encyclopedia Africana' would provide symbolic order to the fragments created over the past 500 years. That is a major contribution.
Corporate responsibility extends not only to the customers, the resources and the workers of the present, but also to those of the future.
Religions have always stressed that compassion is not only central to religious life, it is the key to enlightenment and it the true test of spirituality. But there have always have been those who'd rather put easier goals, like doctrine conformity, in place.
He had the hypocrisy to represent a mourner: and previous to following with Hareton, he lifted the unfortunate child on to the table and muttered, with peculiar gusto, 'Now, my bonny lad, you are mine! And we'll see if one tree won't grow as crooked as another, with the same wind to twist it!
My dreams are a stupid refuge, like an umbrella against a thunderbolt.
Consciousness is an emergent, contingent, and impermanent phenomenon. It has no magical capacity to break free from the field of events out of which it springs.
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