Bella Abzug
Bella Abzug

Just imagine for a moment what life in this country might have been if women had been properly represented in Congress. Would a Congress where women in all their diversity were represented tolerate the countless laws now on the books that discriminate against women in all phases of their lives? Would a Congress with adequate representation of women have allowed this country to reach the 1970s

without a national health care system? Would it have permitted this country to rank fourteenth in infant mortality among the developed nations of the world? Would it have allowed the situation we now have in which thousands of kids grow up without decent care because their working mothers have no place to leave them? Would such a Congress condone the continued butchering of young girls and mothers

in amateur abortion mills? Would it allow fraudulent packaging and cheating of consumers in supermarkets, department stores and other retail outlets? Would it consent to the perverted sense of priorities that has dominated our government for decades, where billions have been appropriated for war while our human needs as a people have been neglected?

Anna Andrejewna Achmatowa
Anna Andrejewna Achmatowa

You…
you are as old as the Mamre oak,
ancient interrogator of the moon,
whose feigned groans cannot take us in.
You write laws of iron.

Kathy Acker
Kathy Acker

Women need to become literary "criminals", break the literary laws and reinvent their own, because the established laws prevent women from presenting the reality of their lives.

John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1. Baron Acton
John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1. Baron Acton

It would be easy to point out a paragraph in St. Augustine, or a sentence of Grotius that outweighs in influence the Acts of fifty Parliaments, and our cause owes more to Cicero and Seneca, to Vinet and Tocqueville, than to the laws of Lycurgus or the Five Codes of France.

John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1. Baron Acton
John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1. Baron Acton

What followed, during many generations, was the cruel domination of class over class, the oppression of the poor by the rich, and of the ignorant by the wise. The spirit of that domination found passionate utterance in the verses of the aristocratic poet Theognis,… who longed to drink the blood of his political adversaries. From these oppressors the people of many cities sought deliverance in

the less intolerable tyranny of revolutionary usurpers. The remedy gave new shape and energy to the evil. …rights secured by equal laws and by sharing power existed nowhere.

John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1. Baron Acton
John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1. Baron Acton

Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral laws are written on the tablets of eternity.

Abigail Adams
Abigail Adams

If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.

Abigail Adams
Abigail Adams

Patriotism in the female s*x is the most disinterested of all virtues. Excluded from honors and from offices, we cannot attach ourselves to the State or Government from having held a place of eminence. Even in the freest countries our property is subject to the control and disposal of our partners, to whom the laws have given a sovereign authority. Deprived of a voice in legislation, obliged to

submit to those laws which are imposed upon us, is it not sufficient to make us indifferent to the public welfare? Yet all history and every age exhibit instances of patriotic virtue in the female sex; which considering our situation equals the most heroic of yours.

Brooks Adams
Brooks Adams

Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.

John Adams
John Adams

I think such laws a great embarrassment, great obstructions to the improvement of the human mind. Books that cannot bear examination, certainly ought not to be established as divine inspiration by penal laws.