Lawyers From The United States

"We know that if this can be done in Boston, it can be done in every community, in every neighborhood of every size in the United States. And we ask the United States Congress to do what you've done here in Massachusetts: cross all party lines, throw politics away, throw the speeches in the trash can, join hands. Let's do what works and make America the safe place it has to be."

"We know we’ve got about six years to turn this juvenile crime thing around. And my successors will not be giving speeches about the wonderful opportunities of the global economy; they’ll be trying to keep body and soul together for people on the streets of these cities."

"Our rich texture of racial, religious and political diversity will be a Godsend in the 21st century. Great rewards will come to those who can live together, learn together, work together, forge new ties that bind together."

"The last time I checked, the Constitution said, 'of the people, by the people and for the people.' That's what the Declaration of Independence says."

"Shalom, haver."

"The road to tyranny, we must never forget, begins with the destruction of the truth."

"I say this to the militias and all others who believe that the greatest threat to freedom comes from the Government instead of from those who would take away our freedom: If you say violence is an acceptable way to make change, you are wrong. If you say that Government is in a conspiracy to take your freedom away, you are just plain wrong. If you treat law enforcement officers who put their lives on the line for your safety every day like some kind of enemy army to be suspected, derided, and if they should enforce the law against you, to be shot, you are wrong. If you appropriate our sacred symbols for paranoid purposes and compare yourselves to colonial militias who fought for the democracy you now rail against, you are wrong. How dare you suggest that we in the freest nation on Earth live in tyranny! How dare you call yourselves patriots and heroes!"

"All Americans, not only in the States most heavily affected but in every place in this country, are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants. The public service they use impose burdens on our taxpayers. That's why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens. In the budget I will present to you, we will try to do more to speed the deportation of illegal aliens who are arrested for crimes, to better identify illegal aliens in the workplace as recommended by the commission headed by former Congresswoman Barbara Jordan. We are a nation of immigrants. But we are also a nation of laws. It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years, and we must do more to stop it."

"When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans, it was assumed that the Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly. That is, when we set up this country, abuse of people by Government was a big problem. So if you read the Constitution, it's rooted in the desire to limit the ability of — Government's ability to mess with you, because that was a huge problem. It can still be a huge problem. But it assumed that people would basically be raised in coherent families, in coherent communities, and they would work for the common good, as well as for the individual welfare."

"Let me tell you something -- wait a minute. You know one things that's wrong with this country? Everybody gets a chance to have their fair say. My budget did more to fight AIDS than any in history, and we're having to put up with this. (Applause.) Tell them to let me talk. (Applause.) If you want to give a speech -- go out there and raise your own crowd. We'll be glad to listen to you. (Applause.) So there were those -- (interruption) -- I'll make you a deal. I'll ignore them if you will. (Applause.)"

"You know, we can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans to legitimately own handguns and rifles -- it's something I strongly support -- we can't be so fixated on that that we are unable to think about the reality of life that millions of Americans face on streets that are unsafe, under conditions that no other nation—no other nations—has permitted to exist. And at some point, I still hope that the leadership of the National Rifle Association will go back to doing what it did when I was a boy and which made me want to be a lifetime member because they put out valuable information about hunting and marksmanship and safe use of guns. But just to know of the conditions we face today in a lot of our cities and other places in this country and the enormous threat to public safety is amazing."

"When I was in England I experimented with marijuana a time or two -- and didn't like it -- and didn't inhale and never tried inhaling again."

"End welfare as we know it."

"Every year Congress and the president sign laws that make us do more things and gives us less money to do it with. I see people in my state, middle-class people — their taxes have gone up in Washington and their services have gone down while the wealthy have gotten tax cuts. I have seen what's happened in this last four years when — in my state, when people lose their jobs there's a good chance I'll know them by their names. When a factory closes, I know the people who ran it. When the businesses go bankrupt, I know them. And I've been out here for 13 months meeting in meetings just like this ever since October, with people like you all over America, people that have lost their jobs, lost their livelihood, lost their health insurance."

"Now, I don't have all the answers, but I do know the old ways don't work. Trickledown economics has sure failed. And big bureaucracies, both private and public, they've failed too. That's why we need a new approach to government, a government that offers more empowerment and less entitlement. More choices for young people in the schools they attend- in the public schools they attend. And more choices for the elderly and for people with disabilities and the long-term care they receive. A government that is leaner, not meaner; a government that expands opportunity, not bureaucracy; a government that understands that jobs must come from growth in a vibrant and vital system of free enterprise."

"I feel your pain."

"Posterity is the world to come; the world for whom we hold our ideals, from whom we have borrowed our planet, and to whom we bear sacred responsibility. We must do what America does best: offer more opportunity to all and demand responsibility from all."

"Our democracy must be not only the envy of the world but the engine of our own renewal. There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America."

"There was a state without king or nobles; there was a church without a bishop; there was a people governed by grave magistrates which it had selected, and by equal laws which it had framed."

"The final end of government is not to exert restraint but to do good."

"We have built no national temples but the Capitol; we consult no common oracle but the Constitution."

"The courage of New England was the "courage of conscience." It did not rise to that insane and awful passion, the love of war for itself."

"Neither irony nor sarcasm is argument."

"A book is the only immortality."

"Its constitution the glittering and sounding generalities of natural right which make up the Declaration of Independence."

"We join ourselves to no party that does not carry the flag, and keep step to the music of the Union."

"Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love of reading."

"All that happens in the world of Nature or Man, — every war; every peace; every hour of prosperity; every hour of adversity; every election; every death ; every life; every success and every failure, — all change, — all permanence, — the perished leaf; the unutterable glory of stars, — all things speak truth to the thoughtful spirit."

"Let today be the first day of a new American Revolution - a Digital Revolution, a revolution built not on blood and conflict, but on language and reason and our faith in each other."

"That is why I found the tactics of the theocratic social conservatives deeply offensive. They were afraid that their convictions about pornography were unlikely to sway the majority of citizens in this country—so afraid, in fact, that they contrived a crisis (the threat to children posed by cyperporn) and even went so far as to help craft and position a purportedly objective (but in fact fraudulent) study whose real, cynical purpose was to promote a panic-driven anti-indecency legislative agenda."

"What adds to the uncertainty, Hansen said, is that the "defenses" provided by the statute—that is, the things you have to do to avoid criminal liability—are defined in terms of whatever filtering or screening technologies happen to be available at any given moment [...] use of "reasonable and effective measures under current technology". As a result, Hansen said, the defenses will change every time the technology changes."

"[The online users reaction to the cyberporn panic] may have been far more effective than a planned event would have been, however. It had vigor, spontaneity, and popular sentiment behind it and was driven by passion and not by calculated maneuvering. And it proved the power of online communities to take on the traditional media establishment, once the playing field has been leveled. The WELL and the World Wide Web and Usenet had leveled the field."

"Perhaps the most likely scenario is this: At some near-future date, perhaps as early as 2010, individuals may no longer be able to do the kinds of things they routinely do with their digital tools in 2003. [...] You can't overestimate the extent to which the two factions are bot pro-copyright [...]. One thing the Tech Faction and the Content Faction have in common is that both supported the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998."

"Leaving aside the issue of whether the comments about Arata and Branham were grounded in hostility toward their gender (rather than hostility toward them as individuals), it seemed clear that what the OCR wants to ban here is not "written conduct" but speech. By classifying it as "conduct," the OCR hoped to bypass the First Amendment's protections."

"The more you impose such liability, the greater the incentives you create for providers to become content police, and you undermine what for many and perhaps most users is the chief value of the Net: direct communication with the rest of the world."

"I first became aware of this larger phenomenon in the wake of the bombing of a federal office building in Oklahoma City. In the days and weeks to follow, I got dozens of calls from the press asking me whether there was legislation pending to ban bomb information on the Net. [...] In reality, of course, the "Internet as threat" meme was generated and disseminated primarily by the press itself."

"It's easy for a senator or a government official to blur the line between speech that's offensive and speech that lacks social value, yet in practice it's often the offensive speech that's the most valuable."

"But don't confuse it with the first vision of "electronic democracy" [...] one day, we were told [in 1992], we'd listen to pundits and politicians debate the issues, and then we'd vote, maybe by pointing our remotes at our TV or computer monitors. Radical pluralism is something different. It's what happens when you put the power of a mass medium—computer communications—into the hands of individual citiens who could never have afforded creative access to other mass media like TV or newspapers. Everyone is now a "content producer"."

"When I worked as a journalist in the 1980s, I was constantly reminded by sources of the common asumption that a newspaper or magazine article wouldn't get things right or would distort the facts to reflect a particular bias. [...] The major newspapers, magazines, and television networks, which are typically, if not always, components of larger corporate organizations, are increasingly regarded by Americans as just another special interest."

"In short, individual freedom of speech leads to a stronger society. But knowing that principle is not enough. You have to know how to put it to use on the Net."

"Striking a balance in favor of individual rights has always been the right decision for us and that it remains so even when technology gives us new ways to exercise those rights. Individual liberty has never weakened us; freedom of speech, enhanced by the Net, will only make us stronger."

"The remedy for the abuse of free speech is more speech."

"The decisions we make about the Internet don't affect just the Internet – they are answers to basic questions about the relationship each citizen has to the government and about the extent to which we trust one another with the full range of fundamental rights granted by the Constitution."

"I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she's too young to have logged on yet. Here's what I worry about. I worry that 10 or 15 or 20 years from now she will come to me and say, "Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?""

"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

"Never run against a war hero."

"He had that quality for which the Africans, who know how to appreciate it, have found a special term. "Nommo" is the Bantu word for the gift of making life rather larger and more vivid for everyone else."

"He was one of the most admired men of his time — and one of the most perplexing, a paradox within himself. Twice he sought his nation's highest office; yet he always thought of the presidency as a "dread responsibility." He was a politician without a politician's ways; instead of grinning gamely when, during one of his campaigns, a little girl handed him a stuffed baby alligator, Stevenson could only gape and exclaim, "For Christ's sake, what's this?" He was a man of rare humor, often expressed in self-deprecating terms. Responding to criticism that he was too intellectual, that he talked over the heads of the voters, he tossed out a Latinism: Via ovum cranium difficilis est (The way of the egghead is hard)."

"Adlai Stevenson squats to piss."

"Moving among wretched people in mean places, as I often saw him do, he had the impulses of a saint but not the serenity."