“…a törvény könyörtelen következetességében néha enyhének és erőtlennek látszott az idő önkényével szemben.”
“In 1996 Dorothy Mackey wrote an Op-ed piece, “Violence from comrades a fact of life for military women.” ABC News 20/ 20 did a segment on rape in the military. By November four women came forward at Aberdeen Proving Ground, in Maryland, about a pattern of rape by drill sergeants. In 1997 the military finds three black drill sergeants to scapegoat. They were sent to prison and this left the commanding generals and colonels untouched to retire quietly. The Army appointed a panel to investigate sexual harassment. One of the panelists was the sergeant Major of the Army, Eugene McKinney. On hearing his nomination, former associates and one officer came forward with charges of sexual coercion and misconduct. In 1998 he was acquitted of all charges after women spoke (of how they were being stigmatized, their careers stopped, and their characters questioned. A Congressional panel studied military investigative practices. In 1998, the Court of Appeals ruled against Dorothy Mackay. She had been outspoken on media and highly visible. There is an old Arabic saying “When the hen crows cut off her head.”“This court finds that Col. Milam and Lt. Col. Elmore were acting in the scope of their duties” in 1991-1992 when Capt. Mackey alleged they harassed, intimidated and assaulted her. A legislative remedy was asked for and she appealed to the Supreme Court. Of course the Supreme Court refused to hear the case in 1999, as it always has under the feres doctrine. Her case was cited to block the suit of one of the Aberdeen survivors as well!”
“A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience as can be imagined.”
“All I wanted to do was hide away from the world, but I still had a role to play. I had to be Girl A - the key witness in the trial that finally saw my abusers locked up. Girl A - the girl in the newspaper stories who had been through the most hideous experience imaginable. When I read those stories, I felt like I was reading about somebody else, another girl who was subjected to the depths of human depravity. But it wasn t. It was about me. I am Girl A.”
“In court the next morning I sat at a table in the judge’s chambers. On the other side of the table, close enough for me to reach across and touch him, sat Ted Bundy. He’s adorable, I thought, surprised at my first impression, because I’d pictured him in my mind as brooding, dark, intense disdain (p. 83). (Loftus testified as a defense expert for Ted Bundy in 1976, Bundy was found guilty of aggravated kidnapping)”
“In front of the law there is a doorkeeper. A man from the countryside comes up to the door and asks for entry. But the doorkeeper says he can t let him in to the law right now. The man thinks about this, and then he asks if he ll be able to go in later on. That s possible, says the doorkeeper, but not now . The gateway to the law is open as it always is, and the doorkeeper has stepped to one side, so the man bends over to try and see in. When the doorkeeper notices this he laughs and says, If you re tempted give it a try, try and go in even though I say you can t. Careful though: I m powerful. And I m only the lowliest of all the doormen. But there’s a doorkeeper for each of the rooms and each of them is more powerful than the last. It s more than I can stand just to look at the third one.”
“We are usually on bended knee before laws or angrily reacting against them, both immature responses.”
“I think there might be a better way,change the law”
“There is a moment in the tractate Menahot when the Rabbis imagine what takes place when Moses ascends Mount Sinai to receive the Torah. In this account (there are several) Moses ascends to heaven, where he finds God busily adding crownlike ornaments to the letters of the Torah. Moses asks God what He is doing and God explains that in the future there will be a man named Akiva, son of Joseph, who will base a huge mountain of Jewish law on these very orthographic ornaments. Intrigued, Moses asks God to show this man to him. Moses is told to go back eighteen rows, and suddenly, as in a dream, Moses is in a classroom, class is in session and the teacher is none other than Rabbi Akiva. Moses has been told to go to the back of the study house because that is where the youngest and least educated students sit. Akiva, the great first-century sage, is explaining Torah to his disciples, but Moses is completely unable to follow the lesson. It is far too complicated for him. He is filled with sadness when, suddenly, one of the disciples asks Akiva how he knows something is true and Akiva answers: It is derived from a law given to Moses on Mount Sinai. Upon hearing this answer, Moses is satisfied - though he can t resist asking why, if such brilliant men as Akiva exist, Moses needs to be the one to deliver the Torah. At this point God loses patience and tells Moses, Silence, it s my will.”
“God is Love but He also is the Lawgiver”
“Believing, as they now did, that the heavenly powers took part in human affairs, they became so much absorbed in the cultivation of religion and so deeply imbued with the sense of their religious duties, that the sanctity of an oath had more power to control their lives than the fear of punishment for lawbreaking.”
“The political reputation of Servius rests upon his organization of society according to a fixed scale of rank and fortune. He originated the census, a measure of the highest utility to a state destined, as Rome was, to future preeminence; for by means of its public service, in peace as well as in war, could thence forward be regularly organized on the basis of property; every man s contribution could be in proportion to his means.”
“We are no longer under the Law , but rather the Grace of God in Christ. ~R. Alan Woods [2013]”
“The laws of men are not infallible.”
“Two types of people laugh at the law: those that break it and those that make it.”
“When states are democratically governed according to law, there are no demagogues, and the best citizens are securely in the saddle; but where the laws are not sovereign, there you find demagogues. The people become a monarch... such people, in its role as a monarch, not being controlled by law, aims at sole power and becomes like a master.”
“A szerkezet, az igazságosztás szerkezete, ez a bonyolult, nagy gépezet, bizonyosan tökéletlen volt, gyakran csikorgott, minden zugában rozsdás volt és poros: de jobbat nem tudott senki, tökéletesebbet nem talált még fel ember, nélkülözni nem lehetett, bele kellett nyugodni. A bíró volt az, aki lélekkel, erővel töltötte meg e gépezetet.”