A Quote by Edmund Burke

Whenever government abandons law, it proclaims anarchy.

Edmund Burke

Quote Topics

Anarchy Government Law Whenever

Quote Author

Edmund Burke
Irish - Statesman
January 12, 1729 - July 9, 1797

Our government... teaches the whole people by its example. If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.

Louis D. Brandeis

Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill it teaches the whole people by example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means - to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal - would bring terrible retributions.

Louis D. Brandeis

You stand now between anarchy and law. The Police have done their duty. Let the jury have the same courage so that the police can indeed rest in peace. The flowers of spring shall bloom upon their graves moistened by the tears of a great city. Outraged and violated law shall be redeemed and in their martyrdom anarchy shall be buried forever.

Jason Epstein

Anarchy is... a form of government or constitution in which public and private consciousness, formed through the development of science and law, is alone sufficient to maintain order and guarantee all liberties.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

This is what the government is, has always been, the creator and defender of privilege; the organization of oppression and revenge. To hope that it can ever become anything else is the vainest of delusions. They tell you that Anarchy, the dream of social order without government, is a wild fancy. The wildest dream that ever entered the heart of man is the dream that mankind can ever help itself through an appeal to law, or to come to any order that will not result in slavery wherein there is any excuse for government.

Voltairine de Cleyre

The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the law of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.

John Adams

To the extent America abandons Israel, it abandons itself.

Yaron Brook

A Church which abandons the truth abandons itself.

Hans Kung

ANARCHY, or the government of each man by himself or as the English say, self -government.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Certainly the worker has nothing to lose by a change from government and capitalism to a condition of no government, of anarchy.

Alexander Berkman

If the jury have no right to judge of the justice of a law of the government, they plainly can do nothing to protect the people against the oppressions of the government; for there are no oppressions which the government may not authorize by law.

Lysander Spooner

Lawlessness is lawlessness. Anarchy is anarchy is anarchy. Neither race nor color nor frustration is an excuse for either lawlessness or anarchy.

Thurgood Marshall

It is cold anarchy to say that all men are to meddle in all men'smarriages. It is cold anarchy to say that any doctor may seize andsegregate anyone he likes. But it is not anarchy to say that a fewgreat hygienists might enclose or limit the life of all citizens,as nurses do with a family of children. It is not anarchy, it istyranny; but tyranny is a workable thing.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Whenever men take the law into their own hands, the loser is the law. And when the law loses, freedom languishes.

Robert Kennedy

The government can always rescue the markets or interfere with contract law whenever it deems convenient with little or no apparent cost. (Investors believe this now and, worse still, the government believes it as well. We are probably doomed to a lasting legacy of government tampering with financial markets and the economy, which is likely to create the mother of all moral hazards. The government is blissfully unaware of the wisdom of Friedrich Hayek: "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.")