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.
Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, great as each may be, their highest comfort given to the sorrowful is a cordial introduction into another's woe. Sorrow's the great community in which all men born of woman are members at one time or another.
Everyone has two memories. The one you can tell and the one that is stuck to the underside of that, the dark, tarry smear of what happened.
As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other, and the former will be objects to which the latter attach themselves.
I obviously don't feel under pressure to look young, because I have had no Botox or surgery. I don't judge people who choose to have it, but I don't want to erase who I am.
We are taught that the body is an ignorant animal intelligence dwells only in the head. But the body is smart. It does not discern between external stimuli and stimuli from the imagination. It reacts equally viscerally to events from the imagination as it does to real events.
Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced.
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