Lawlessness Quotes

When the injunction was issued in Birmingham, our failure to obey it bewildered our opponents. They did not know what to do. We did not hide our intentions. In fact, I announced our plan to the press, pointing out that we were not anarchists advocating lawlessness, but that it was obvious to us that the courts of Alabama had misused the judicial process in order to perpetuate injustice and segregation. Consequently, we could not, in good conscience, obey their findings. I intended to be one of the first to set ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

In 1938, after Austria, our universe had become accustomed to inhumanity, to lawlessness, and brutality as never in centuries before. In a former day the occurrences in unhappy Vienna alone would have been sufficient to cause international proscription, but in 1938 the world conscience was silent or merely muttered surlily before it forgot and forgave. ~ Stefan Zweig

Fore more than a decade - from the mid-1950s until the late 1960s - conservatives systematically and strategically linked opposition to civil rights legislation to calls for law and order, arguing that Martin Luther King Jr.'s philosophy of civil disobedience was a leading cause of crime. Civil rights protests were frequently depicted as criminal rather than political in nature, and federal courts were accused of excessive 'lenience' toward lawlessness, thereby contributing to the spread of crime. ~ Michelle Alexander

Culture in any place always goes top down, never bottom up. We need to step back and look at what kind of environment we have created for ourselves and those around us. It is tough to expect positive behavior in a negative environment. Where lawlessness becomes the law, honest citizens become cheats, crooks and thieves. ~ Shiv Khera

It is doubt that makes faith precious,
deciet that makes honesty precious,
grief that makes happiness precious,
error that makes truth precious,
fear that makes love precious,
pride that makes humility precious,
shame that makes honor precious,
anger that makes peace precious,
greed that makes contentment precious,
despair that makes hope precious,
cruelty that makes kindness precious,
disloyalty that makes commitment precious,
lawlessness that makes justice precious,
vengance that makes forgiveness precious,
frustration that makes patience precious,
hatred that makes tolerance precious,
disbelief that makes trust precious,
uncertainty that makes confidence precious,
skepticism that makes conviction precious,
insolence that makes courtesy precious,
impoliteness that makes manners precious,
imprudence that makes civility precious,
contempt that esteem precious,
meanness that makes hospitality precious,
stinginess that makes generosity precious,
roughness that makes gentleness precious,
negligence that makes discipline precious,
and confusion that makes order precious. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

This pursuit of Theo was not borne out of hatred for him as a man or a Jew. All of that was just an excuse - an excuse for lawless men to take what belonged to others. It seemed strange that those who served the Hitlers and the Himmlers and the Gorings believed constant lies. "The Jew is a misfortune." It was those little men in the service of greed who were the most violent, the most dedicated to the brutality of the racial policies. They murdered and terrorized for one reason only: because they could. They were the law of the lawlessness; the power of evil was their creed and their joy and their god! ~ Bodie Thoene

The law of war is harsh. If there's anything good at all in a war, it's that it brings the best and the worst out of people: some people try to use the lawlessness to hurt others, and some try to reduce the suffering to minimum. ~ Mohamedou Ould Slahi

What happens when a sheepdog gets bit by a wolf?"
"Duh. It becomes a wolf."
"No. It becomes a sheepdog that fights with the lawlessness and savagery of a wolf. ~ Karen Marie Moning

We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization - black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion and love ... What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black. ~ Robert F. Kennedy

In antiquity the sage kings recognized that men's nature is bad and that their tendencies were not being corrected and their lawlessness controlled. ~ Xun Zi

Is lawlessness to be permitted, simply because it is effected with a certain style? Jane, Jane! Where are your finer sensibilities? All o'erthrown, by a man with a golden tongue and a mocking glance? ~ Stephanie Barron

Not everyone is willing to break the rules and customs like I am. But I say that customs are made to serve us, we are not made to serve customs.

But if everyone thought that way there would be lawlessness.

I'd flame anyone else who disobeyed our customs. That's only for me. ~ Sarah K.L. Wilson

Percussion music is revolution. Sound and rhythm have too long been submissive to the restrictions of nineteenth century music. Today we are fighting for their emancipation. Tomorrow, with electronic music in our ears, we will hear freedom. At the present stage of revolution, a healthy lawlessness is warranted. Experiment must necessarily be carried on by hitting anything-tin pans, rice bowls, iron pipes-anything we can lay our hands on. Not only hitting, but rubbing, scraping, making sound in every possible way ... What we can't do ourselves will be done by machines which we will invent. ~ John Cage

There is no freedom, but everything in the world takes place entirely according to nature....Transcendental freedom is therefore opposed to the law of causality, and represents such a connection of successive states of effective causes, that no unity of experience is possible with it. It is therefore an empty fiction of the mind, and not to be met with in any experience.
We have, therefore, nothing but nature, in which we must try to find the connection and order of cosmical events. Freedom (independence) from the laws of nature is no doubt a deliverance from restraint, but also from the guidance of all rules. For we cannot say that, instead of the laws of nature, laws of freedom may enter into the causality of the course of the world, because, if determined by laws, it would not be freedom, but nothing else but nature. Nature, therefore, and transcendental freedom differ from each other like legality and lawlessness. The former, no doubt, imposes upon the understanding the difficult task of looking higher and higher for the origin of events in the series of causes, because their causality is always conditioned. In return for this, however, it promises a complete and well-ordered unity of experience; while, on the other side, the fiction of freedom promises, no doubt, to the enquiring mind, rest in the chain of causes, leading him up to an unconditioned causality, which begins to act by itself, but which, as it is blind itself, tears the thread of rules by which alone a ~ Immanuel Kant

When people lack teachers, their tendencies are not corrected; when they do not have ritual and moral principles, then their lawlessness is not controlled. ~ Xun Zi

My belief is that, morally, God and Satan are vaguely on the same page. According to the common understanding of Satan's origins, 'holiness' is, metaphorically, frozen stiff in his veins: and at that a corrupted formula - i.e. legalism. The vital difference is that God is willing to offer grace for our sins; he delights in grace. God is the one and only holy and just punisher of sin, yes, but that is partly so because punishment for the sake of punishment is not something he loves. Whereas Satan, as the accuser, and as it is written, actually seeks God's permission to punish; he, being a seasoned legalist, delights in finding wrongs and will defy his own morality just to expose immorality. This is why both the anti-religious soul and the violently religious soul are, whether consciously or unconsciously, and sadly enough, glorifying their biggest hater: Satan is not only a lawless lover of punishing lawlessness, but also the sharpest theologian of us all. He loves wickedness, but only because he loves punishing wickedness. ~ Criss Jami

The storm center of lawlessness in every American State is the State Capitol. It is there that the worst crimes are committed; it is there that lawbreaking attains to the estate and dignity of a learned profession; it is there that contempt for the laws is engendered, fostered, and spread broadcast. ~ H.L. Mencken

Where a harsh law rules, people yearn for lawlessness. ~ Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

Decide yourself who was right: you or the one who questioned you then? Recall the first question; its meaning, though not literally, was this: 'You want to go into the world, and you are going empty-handed, with some promise of freedom, which they in their simplicity and innate lawlessness cannot even comprehend, which they dread and fear - for nothing has ever been more insufferable for man and for human society than freedom! But do you see these stones in this bare, scorching desert? Turn them into bread and mankind will run after you like sheep, grateful and obedient, though eternally trembling lest you withdraw your hand and your loaves cease for them. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Sin is lawlessness and constitutes the doer thereof a rebel against the righteous rule of His sovereign Lord. ~ C.F.W. Walther

Rule by decree has conspicuous advantages for the domination of far-flung territories with heterogeneous populations and for a policy of oppression. Its efficiency is superior simply because it ignores all intermediary stages between issuance and application, and because it prevents political reasoning by the people through the withholding of information. It can easily overcome the variety of local customs and need not rely on the necessarily slow process of development of general law. It is most helpful for the establishment of a centralized administration because it overrides automatically all matters of local autonomy. If rule by good laws has sometimes been called the rule of wisdom, rule by appropriate decrees may rightly be called the rule of cleverness. For it is clever to reckon with ulterior motives and aims, and it is wise to understand and create by deduction from generally accepted principles.

Government by bureaucracy has to be distinguished from the mere outgrowth and deformation of civil services which frequently accompanied the decline of the nation-state - as, notably, in France. There the administration has survived all changes in regime since the Revolution, entrenched itself like a parasite in the body politic, developed its own class interests, and become a useless organism whose only purpose appears to be chicanery and prevention of normal economic and political development. There are of course many superficial similarities between the two typ ~ Hannah Arendt

Ending the lawlessness at the border? I don't believe a fourth-generation Hispanic thinks that's evil. I don't think an African American thinks there's anything wrong with protecting their jobs for a change. ~ Jeff Sessions

The spot where God's triumph is achieved, God's victory over sin, over lawlessness, is the cross of Calvary- the cross on which the Son of God died. In that cross and through the cross the works of the devil were destroyed, and the One who conquered him is yet to bruise the serpent's head in the final triumph when He comes again, as recorded in prophecy. ~ Arno C. Gaebelein

The right to rebellion is the right to seek a higher rule, and not to wander in mere lawlessness. ~ George Eliot

The more laws that are created, the closer we get to lawlessness. ~ J.S.B. Morse

Remember what it says in Matthew: And false prophets shall abound, and they shall deceive many'" "And from the multiplication of lawlessness, love shall grow cold in many," said Pelagia, continuing the apostolic citation. Dolinin started and gave the nun a strange look, as if he had just heard those words for the first time, or perhaps had never really thought about their meaning before. ~ Boris Akunin

The laws governed people's happiness. To be lawless was to be happy. ~ Jess C. Scott

Lawlessness is a self-perpetuating, ever-expanding habit. ~ Dorothy Thompson

If the foundation of a well-ordered society is a healthy, happy home, then the problem of lawlessness will not be solved by more laws or legislation; but by fathers and mothers exerting a moral influence and example in their own families, tempered with love and understanding. ~ J. Spencer Kinard

Only lawlessness and chaos can be born out of lawlessness and chaos. ~ Courtney Milan

"You're drawn to the darkness, to the lawlessness. Drawn to ... "
Morpheus.
Even if Dad doesn't say it out loud, I hear the name echo in the silence. ~ A.G. Howard

One can be addicted to either lawlessness or lawfulness. Theologically there is no difference since both break relationship with God, the giver. ~ GERHARD O. FORDE ~ Elyse M. Fitzpatrick

Doth Nature draw me, 'tis because, Unto my seeming, there doth lurk A lawlessness about her laws, More mood than purpose in her work. ~ Alfred Austin

The end of an age is always a time of turmoil, war, economic catastrophe, cynicism, lawlessness and distress. But it is also an era of heightened challenge and creativity, of issues, and their world-wide scope, never has an era faced a more demanding and exciting crisis. This then, above all else, is the great and glorious era to live in, a time of of opportunity, one requiring fresh and vigorous thinking, indeed, a glorious time to be alive. ~ Rousas John Rushdoony

Thirty years people have been asking for a lawful system of immigration to end this lawlessness, and government on both parties have refused to give it to them. ~ Jeff Sessions

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

Old people always exaggerate the danger and lawlessness of their youth, thought Cam, because their adult lives have become so boring. ~ Wendy Wunder

When the hippie era ended and the hangover began, as idealism gives way to disillusionment, the hair of the marchers and street-dancers kept getting longer, and soon it began to tangle. Free love deteriorated into loveless promiscuity, our great electric Kool-Aid acid test churned out an entire generation of burnt-out old relics, and the hair, once a symbol of freedom, became symbolic of the new face of prison, a lawlessness which taken to its logical extreme would imprison all of society as our growing criminal element took to the streets. ~ Tommy Walker

There is a meltdown of authority going on in the world and a corresponding increase of lawlessness. The earth itself is also going through travail to give birth to the messengers of power who are sent to prepare the way for the coming of the kingdom by preaching the gospel of the kingdom throughout the earth. ~ Rick Joyner

What can defeat greed, technological superiority, and legal lawlessness ... is discipline, consciousness, and unity. ~ Toni Cade Bambara

Do not handicap yourself with the idea of revenge, for the trend of things will revenge your wrong not only upon the individuals responsible for your persecution, but on the society that has permitted this lawlessness. ~ Vidkun Quisling

If we ignore international institutions, it will lead only to lawlessness and anarchy. ~ Lisa Anderson

The desert to us is tohu wabohu, a place of chaos that is unformed and unfilled. When we crossed the Red Sea, Yahweh had promised us that he would crush the heads of Leviathan and Rahab and create the heavens and the earth out of the chaos. This was another way of saying that Yahweh would establish his kingdom covenant order out of the disorder and lawlessness that was Canaan. Sending the goat out into the desert to Azazel, was not an offering to the damnable goat demon, but rather it was a banishment of Israel's sin to the realm of chaos outside Yahweh's kingdom - the same realm of Azazel. ~ Brian Godawa

I believe we should follow the text of every law, even (a) law I disagree with, it's one of the real differences
if you look at President Obama and the lawlessness, if he disagrees with a law he simply refuses to follow it or claims the authority to unilaterally change. ~ Ted Cruz

The lawlessness of frontier life in America has been pictured as a remarkable phenomenon. In reality, it was the natural consequence of indiscriminate mixing of volatile substances. ~ Paul Harris

When you don't have any reason to think of days as weekdays or weekends, you start to realize that all days are pretty much the same. And that kind of gives you the freedom to do whatever you want. It's a lot easier to seize the day than it is to seize a Tuesday. You have errands on Tuesday. On Tuesday you eat pizza again. Your favorite show is on Tuesday, you know? But the day ... The day is all just hours you're alive for. They can be filled with anything. Unexpectedness, wildness, maybe a little bit of lawlessness, even. If that makes sense. ~ Adi Alsaid

It may be the reason behind the apostolic prayer for the disciples to be filled with a dimension of the Holy Spirit beyond the original baptism. This conceptual crisis may account for the falling away of the Galatians; the sustained immaturity of the Hebrews; the lawlessness of the Corinthians; and the mixture among the Colossians. It becomes obvious that the apostolic exhortations to "grow in grace and in the knowledge of the Lord," and to be "steadfast and immovable" are invitations to a sphere of intelligence that promote productive stewardship in the Kingdom of God. ~ Kirby Clements Sr.

Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state has become lawless or corrupt. And a citizen who barters with such a state shares in its corruption and lawlessness. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

We're in a state of crisis where our nation is literally ripping apart at the seams right now, and lawlessness is occurring from one ocean to the other. And we're seeing the fulfillment of the Book of Judges here in our own time, where every man doing that which is right in his own eyes-in other words, anarchy. ~ Michele Bachmann

Strange, how in all those apocalyptic movies, when their society breaks down into lawlessness and anarchy, Canada is always the haven of safety, the place people want to escape to. ~ Jenifer Mohammed

When we realized we are wrong, we must confess sins. THEN return to seek the right ways of God. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

When the family is destroyed, the ancient laws of family duty cease; when law ceases, lawlessness overwhelms the family; when lawlessness overwhelms the women of the family, they become corrupted; when women are corrupted, the intermixture of castes is the inevitable result. Intermixture of castes drags down to hell both those who destroy the family and the family itself; the spirits of the ancestors fall, deprived of their offerings of rice and water. Such are the evils caused by those who destroy the family: because of the intermixture of castes, caste duties are obliterated and the permanent duties of the family as well. ~ Anonymous Bhagavad Gita

With the tools of democracy, democracy was murdered and lawlessness made "legal." Raw power ruled, and its only real goal was to destroy all other powers besides itself. ~ Eric Metaxas

Most people, Gurion, most people do not violate boundaries, do not defy governance, and most of them come out intact, whereas very few of those who act lawlessly do. And that is why school is so much about following rules. You are here, above all else, to learn to live lawfully for the rest of your life. You are here to learn how to exist in cages without acting as if they are cages, to live like mensches despite being locked in cages. You are here to learn to survive in the world. That is the most basic purpose of our educational system, and it is a high purpose. ~ Adam Levin

The very reason why we object to state ownership, that it puts a stop to individual initiative and to the healthy development of personal responsibility, is the reason why we object to an unsupervised, unchecked monopolistic control in private hands. We urge control and supervision by the nation as an antidote to the movement for state socialism. Those who advocate total lack of regulation, those who advocate lawlessness in the business world, themselves give the strongest impulse to what I believe would be the deadening movement toward unadulterated state socialism. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

The true Razumov had his being in the willed, in the determined future - in that future menaced by the lawlessness of autocracy - for autocracy knows no law - and the lawlessness of revolution. ~ Joseph Conrad

Can the fundamental nature of matter really be lawlessness? Can the stability and order of the world be but a temporary dynamic equilibrium achieved in a corner of the universe, a short-lived eddy in a chaotic current? ~ Liu Cixin

...The underlying motive for the French wars [of 1562-1598] was not religious, but dynastic. By the mid-16th century, the Valois family of kings, who had ruled France since 1328, was losing its grasp on political power. Valois King Henry II died in 1559, leaving four sons, all too young or too feeble to rule alone, and three rival noble families, all eager to seize power. One, the Guise (who had married into the royal family), were Catholic; their enemies, the Bourbon and the (more moderate) Montmerency, were Protestant. The Bourbon, in particular, were supported by the many small local Protestant churches that had been set up in France by supporters of Calvin's teachings. Unlike Protestants in England or Germany, they were not controlled by powerful rulers or city councils; some were prepared to use violence and other forms of lawlessness to further Protestant reform. Concerned by this threat to public order, and continuing the Valois' kings generally hostile policy toward reform, in 1562 the Guise ordered the massacre of 74 Protestants at a church service. ~ Fiona MacDonald

If we don't fight lawlessness, it prevails. ~ Sunday Adelaja

Everyone was willing to take some small risk to lessen the damage of their ambition and disorder and lawlessness. ~ Kristin Cashore

All sin without distinction - is lawlessness. ~ Jerry Bridges

He put the old cant of the lawlessness of art and the art of lawlessness with a certain impudent freshness which gave at least a momentary pleasure. He ~ G.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

That before the Antichrist can be revealed, there will be a falling away, a forsaking, on the part of professing believers. This will not be a time when just a few people abandon their doctrinal beliefs; it will mark a period of major, widespread departure from the faith. In His Olivet discourse, Jesus predicted such a time: "Many will be offended, will betray one another, and will hate one another. Then many false prophets will rise up and deceive many. And because lawlessness will abound, the love of many will grow cold" (Matthew 24:10-12). ~ David Jeremiah

Also, unless you critique moralism, many irreligious people won't know the difference between moralism and what you're offering. The way to get antinomians to move away from lawlessness is to distinguish the gospel from legalism. Why? Because modern and post-modern people have been rejecting Christianity for years thinking that it was indistinguishable from moralism. Non-Christians will always automatically hear gospel presentations as appeals to become moral and religious, unless in your preaching you use the good news of grace to deconstruct legalism. Only if you show them there's a difference - that what they really rejected wasn't real Christianity at all - will they even begin to consider Christianity.2 ~ Tullian Tchividjian

Non-praying is lawlessness, discord, anarchy. ~ Edward McKendree Bounds

The land was torn apart in a legal dispute. Soon it was so devastated, nothing could live here- not plant or animal. Only lawyers. But eventually the place fell into lawlessness, and lawyers can't exist in an area of lawlessness, so they went feral. Some say they still roam the land. You'll suddenly hear someone yell, 'Objection!' and then you'll be torn apart like an improperly witnessed contract. ~ Frank J. Fleming

When the strongest nation in the world can be tied up for years in a war with no end in sight, when the richest nation in the world can't manage its own economy, when the nation with the greatest tradition of the rule of law is plagued by unprecedented lawlessness, and when the President of the United States cannot travel abroad or to any major city at home without fear of a hostile demonstration - then it's time for new leadership for the United States of America. ~ Richard M. Nixon

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black. ~ Robert Kennedy

I am really not tired, which I almost wonder at; for we must have walked at least a mile in this wood. Do not you think we have? '
'Not half a mile,' was his sturdy answer; for he was not yet so much in love as to measure distance, or reckon time, with feminine lawlessness. ~ Jane Austen

Yes, it is worse than thrown away, because every fair minded man must admit that the expenditure of this sum of money in the county for intoxicating liquor creates lawlessness, makes criminals, wrecks homes and brings trouble to innocent women and children. ~ Thomas Jordan Jarvis

There are moments in which the teacher, as the authority talks to the learners, says what must be done, establishes limits without which the very freedom of learners is lost in lawlessness, but these moments, in accordance with the political options of the educator, are alternated with others in which the educator speaks with the learner. ~ Paulo Freire

While Jefferson and the Republicans made light of the excesses of the Revolution in France, the Federalists were horrified to see America's sister-republic and erstwhile ally descend into lawlessness. ~ Adam Zamoyski

Much of the apparent uniformity of Nature is a uniformity of averages. Our gross senses only take cognizance of the average effect of vast numbers of individual particles and processes; and the regularity of the average might well be compatible with a great degree of lawlessness of the individual. I do not think it is possible to dismiss statistical laws (such as the second law of thermodynamics) as merely mathematical adaptations of the other classes of law to certain practical problems. ~ Arthur Stanley Eddington

The subjects which he has chosen, however, are of both historic and dramatic importance, and they have the added value of giving the modern reader a clear picture of the state of semi-lawlessness which existed in Europe, during the middle ages. ~ Alexandre Dumas

Both religiousness and lawlessness share the same problems: overconfidence and unrighteousness. "Why do bad things happen to good people?" we might ask - the very question that betrays our misplaced assumption that we somehow deserve a good life. ~ Tim Chaddick

If the educated and influential classes in a community either practice or connive at the systematic violation of laws that seem to them to cross their convenience, what can they expect when the lesson that convenience or a supposed class interest is a sufficient cause for lawlessness has been well learned by the ignorant classes? ~ Benjamin Harrison

We're seeing the fulfillment of the Book of Judges here in our own time - every man doing that which is right in his own eyes. ~ Michele Bachmann