For what avail the plough or sail
Or land or life, if freedom fail?
The wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand which perishes in the twisting.
Our distrust is very expensive. The money we spend for courts and prisons is very ill laid out.
Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well. What satire on government can equal the severity of censure conveyed in the word politics which now for ages has signified cunning, intimating that the State is a trick?
No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition, as if everything were titular and ephemeral but him. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.