Limitation Quotes - page 3
In secondary immigration, as I await processing, I sit with people for whom I imagine the experience is less of a novelty. To be blunt, non-white people. Mexican and Arabian people, mostly-I assume, I don't look at their passports; they don't have them, they're behind the desks with the border police, equally trapped and obese, behind the counter, often the same color as the people they're casually harassing. "Who does this notion of nation most suit,” I wonder as I sit there, unable to use my phone. Proper rich people don't encounter these rooms, these borders, these problems. For them the world is as it is when seen from space, without boundary, without limitation, full of fluid possibility and whispering wonder.
Russell Brand
The powers of the legislature are defined, and limited; and that those limits may not be mistaken, or forgotten, the constitution is written. To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing, if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained? The distinction, between a government with limited and unlimited powers, is abolished, if those limits do not confine the persons on whom they are imposed, and if acts prohibited and acts allowed, are of equal obligation. It is a proposition too plain to be contested, that the constitution controls any legislative act repugnant to it; or, that the legislature may alter the constitution by an ordinary act.
John Marshall
What is the good, I ask, in the name of common sense, of prohibiting sweating in this country if you allow sweated goods to come in from foreign countries? If you insist on limitation, of hours and upon precautions for security, bear in mind all these things add to the cost of production, to the difficulties of the manufacturer in selling his goods, and unless you give him some increased price, some increased advantage in compensation, then he cannot carry on competition any longer. All these conditions in the long run will result not to your advantage, for you will have no work to do, but to the advantage of the foreigner, who is not so scrupulous and who conducts his work without any of these conditions...If protected labour is good, and I think in many ways it is...then it is good to protect the results of labour, and you cannot do one without the other.
Joseph Chamberlain
History has a way of reducing individuals to flat, two-dimensional portraits. It is the enemy of subjectivity, which is why Stephen Dedalus called it "a nightmare from which I am trying to awake". If we think of Kierkegaard, of Nietzsche, of Hölderlin, we see them standing alone, outside of history. They are spotlighted by their intensity, and the background is all darkness. They intersect history, but are not a part of it. There is something anti-history about such men; they are not subject to time, accident and death, but their intensity is a protest against it. I have elsewhere called such men "Outsiders" because they attempt to stand outside history. which defines humanity on terms of limitation, not of possibility.
Colin Wilson