When a legislature decides to steal some of our rights and plans to use police force to accomplish it, what's the real difference between them and the thief? Darn little! They hide behind the excuse that they're legislating democratically. The fact they do it by a majority vote has no moral significance whatsoever. Numerical might does not constitute right, no more than a lynch mob can justify its act because a majority participated.
Interpretation
The quote criticizes the idea that the majority can override individual rights under the guise of democracy.
H. L. Richardson's quote highlights a profound concern about the moral implications of legislative actions that infringe on individual rights. By drawing a parallel between a thief and a legislature that uses force to enact laws, Richardson argues that majority rule does not equate to moral correctness. The quote serves as a caution against the unchecked power of the majority and emphasizes that ethical considerations should prevail over sheer numerical strength.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about civil rights and government overreach during a political debate.
The young man knows that he is irretrievably lost. This is no town of cats, he finally realizes. It is the place where he is meant to be lost. It is another world, which has been prepared especially for him. And never again, for all eternity, will the train stop at this station to take him back to the world he came from.
I am what you might call abstractly anti-capitalist. For instance, I am suspicious of the old leftists who focus all their hatred on the United States. What about Chinese neo-colonialism? Why are the left silent about that? When I say this, it annoys them, of course. Good!
We commonly say in the trade that the most dangerous animal in a zoo is Man.
It appears to me that those who rely simply on the weight of authority to prove any assertion, without searching out the arguments to support it, act absurdly. I wish to question freely and to answer freely without any sort of adulation. That well becomes any who are sincere in the search for truth.
Because racism is not like jealousy or selfishness, it is not a primal urge or a basic instinct, it is a 400-year-old political and economic system that has infected our institutions, our culture and even our thinking.
Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.