Prohibition Quotes - Page 10

• For a government to declare a vice to be a crime, and to punish it as such, is an attempt to falsify the very nature of things. It is as absurd as it would be to declare truth to be a falsehood, or falsehood a truth.

  Lysander Spooner

  Truth, Government, Vices

  Lysander Spooner (2006). “Vices Are Not Crimes: A Vindication of Moral Liberty”, p.2, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• To some, freedom means the opportunity to do what they want to do; to most it means not to do what they do not want to do. It is perhaps true that those who can grow will feel free under any condition.

  Eric Hoffer

  Respect, Freedom, Mean

  Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• There is no express grant of habeas in the Constitution. There's a prohibition against taking it away.

  Alberto Gonzales

  Constitution, Grants

  "Gonzales: 'There Is No Express Grant of Habeas Corpus In The Constitution'". Senate Judiciary Committee Hearings Transcript, thinkprogress.org. January 19, 2007.

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• I think that, that it would be hard for New Hampshire to vote for somebody who was a fundamentalist minister, affable as he is. He does seem to actually want to write, for example, a prohibition against abortion into the Constitution , which Ronald Reagan, for all his talking about it, never tried to do one time.

  Mike Huckabee

  Writing, Thinking, Talking

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• By requiring that an execution be relatively painless, we necessarily protect the inmate from enduring any punishment that is comparable to the suffering inflicted on his victim. This trend, while appropriate and required by the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, actually undermines the very premise on which public approval of the retribution rationale is based.

  John Paul Stevens

  Punishment, Suffering, Trends

  Baze v. Rees, 553 U.S. 35, www.law.cornell.edu. 2008.

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• [As in the case of] alcohol prohibition, illegality has driven organized crime, sent countless people to jail, and killed many thousands. Repression does not work.

  Sam Branson

  Jail, People, Alcohol

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• Barack Obama's understanding of what the drug war had cost the country was meaningful. And very quietly in his second term, he and Eric Holder did make some adjustments in terms of the use of the Department of Justice, on the federal level. You saw ratcheting back of drug prohibition, and mass incarceration. You also saw, on the part of some certain states, a realization that they followed the war on drugs to a useless place, that they were only doing damage to communities, and bankrupting budgets with prison construction.

  David Simon

  Meaningful, Country, War

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• The ban on sports betting does exactly what Prohibition did. It makes criminals rich.

  James Surowiecki

  Sports, Criminals, Doe

  "A ‘Grown-Up Discussion’ About Sports Betting". fifthdown.blogs.nytimes.com. February 6, 2013.

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• I maintain the importance of an absolute prohibition against torture, while acknowledging that even absolute prohibitions can sometimes be broken. If that is a contradiction, it is a contradiction that ethics has to embrace, or else it becomes like glass: hard, clear, but fatally inflexible.

  Julian Baggini

  Glasses, Broken, Ethics

  "Never saying never to torture" by Julian Baggini, www.theguardian.com. May 11, 2011.

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• From the outset, MoMA followed the Bauhaus's strict prohibition against design that even hinted at the decorative, a prejudice that skewed the pioneering museum's view of Modernism for decades.

  Martin Filler

  Museums, Views, Design

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• Anyone who knows he is loved is in turn prompted to love. It is the Lord himself, who loved us first, who asks us to place at the center of our lives love for him and for the people he has loved. It is especially adolescents and young people, who feel within them the pressing call to love, who need to be freed from the widespread prejudice that Christianity, with its commandments and prohibitions, sets too many obstacles in the path of the joy of love and, in particular prevents people from fully enjoying the happiness that men and women find in their love for one another.

  Pope Benedict XVI

  Love Life, Men, People

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• So many things which once had distressed or revolted him — the speeches and pronouncements of the learned, their assertions and their prohibitions, their refusal to allow the universe to move — all seemed to him now merely ridiculous, non-existent, compared with the majestic reality, the flood of energy, which now revealed itself to him: omnipresent, unalterable in its truth, relentless in its development, untouchable in its serenity, maternal and unfailing in its protectiveness.

  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

  Moving, Reality, Serenity

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• There is no logical basis for the prohibition of marijuana. $7.7 billion is a lot of money, but that is one of the lesser evils. Our failure to successfully enforce these laws is responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in Colombia. I haven't even included the harm to young people. It's absolutely disgraceful to think of picking up a 22-year-old for smoking pot. More disgraceful is the denial of marijuana for medical purposes.

  Milton Friedman

  Marijuana, Thinking, Years

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• The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable, of what has been expelled from the land of language, removed as a result of ancient prohibitions.

  Italo Calvino

  Ocean, Land, Language

  "Cybernetics and Ghosts" (1969)

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• The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest form from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a natural philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society.

  H. L. Mencken

  Freedom, Philosophy, Ideas

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• "God", "immortality of the soul", "redemption", "beyond" - Without exception, concepts to which I have never devoted any attention, or time; not even as a child. Perhaps I have never been childlike enough for them?
  I do not by any means know atheism as a result; even less as an event: It is a matter of course with me, from instinct. I am too inquisitive, too questionable, too exuberant to stand for any gross answer. God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers - at bottom merely a gross prohibition for us: you shall not think!

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Children, Mean, Thinking

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2009). “Basic Writings of Nietzsche”, p.692, Modern Library

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• Golf is not a good walk spoiled. It is becoming a good walk prohibited. Show me the common sense in this and I promise I will relent. But there is no common sense at all in the prohibition of walking.

  Lorne Rubenstein

  Golf, Common Sense, Promise

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• We are losing the war against cancer... I would like to offer for your consideration the following legislative proposals on the following topics: prohibition of the authorisation of new carcinogenic products; reduction of toxics in use; right-to-know...

  Samuel Epstein

  War, Cancer, Epidemics

  Samuel Epstein's Right Livelihood Acceptance Speech, www.rightlivelihoodaward.org. December 31, 1998.

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• A fool who, after plain warning, persists in dosing himself with dangerous drugs should be free to do so, for his death is a benefit to the race in general.

  H. L. Mencken

  Race, Political, Drug

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.423, Knopf

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• He who reforms himself has done more towards reforming the public than a crowd or noisy, impotent patriots.

  Johann Kaspar Lavater

  Reform, Done, Crowds

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• Our current prison state has the dual effect of getting rid of a superfluous population of basically unskilled workers (with a close race-class correlation), and also demonizing them... The drug war is basically for this - It has nothing to do with drugs, but it has plenty to do with criminalizing an unwanted population and scaring everybody else.

  Noam Chomsky

  War, Race, Class

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• The U.S. Bill of Rights is being steadily eroded, with two million telephone calls tapped, 30 million workers under electronic surveillance, and, says the author, countless Americans harassed by a government that wages spurious wars against drugs and terrorism.

  Gore Vidal

  War, Rights, Government

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• Although drugs are immoral and must be kept from the young, thousands of schools pressure parents to give the drug Ritalin to any lively child who may, sensibly, show signs of boredom in his classroom. Ritalin renders the child docile if not comatose. Side effects? "Stunted growth, facial tics, agitation and aggression, insomnia, appetite loss, headaches, stomach pains and seizures." Marijuana would be far less harmful.

  Gore Vidal

  Children, Pain, School

  "The Last Empire" by Gore Vidal, www.nytimes.com. November 1998.

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• The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and comcribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent.

  Billy Sunday

  Children, Memories, Men

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• And on the seventh day, god stepped back and said and said, "This is my creation, perfect in every way... oh, dammit I left all this pot all over the place. Now they'll think I want them to smoke it... Now I have to create Republicans."

  Bill Hicks

  Thinking, Perfect, Want

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