Magna Carta Quotes

They wanted to teach us the meaning of x in relation to pi, as opposed to helping us better understand ourselves and each other. They wanted us to know when the Magna Carta was signed-never mind what it was-as opposed to discussing birth control.

The essence of Western civilization is the Magna Carta, not the Magna Mac. The fact that non-Westerners may bite into the latter has no implications for their accepting the former.

2. We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.

The argument now that the spread of pop culture and consumer goods around the world represents the triumph of Western civilization trivializes Western culture. The essence of Western civilization is the Magna Carta, not the Magna Mac. The fact that non-Westerners may bite into the latter has no implications for their accepting the former.

The contemporary Matthew Paris wrote that, ‘foul as it is, hell itself is defiled by the foulness of King John’. A bard sang that ‘no man may ever trust him, for his heart is soft and cowardly’. Yet this evil was catalyst for a greater good, Magna Carta.

Obama’s global drone assassination campaign, a remarkable innovation in global terrorism, exhibits the same patterns. By most accounts, it is generating terrorists more rapidly than it is murdering those suspected of someday intending to harm us—an impressive contribution by a constitutional lawyer on the eight hundredth anniversary of Magna Carta, which established the basis for the principle of presumption of innocence that is the foundation of civilized law.

Man, didn't anybody ever tell you that art is propaganda? It doesn't matter whether you think it should be or it shouldn't be, it just is, and motherfucker, like or not, you're sitting on a funky Magna Carta.

The priceless copy of Magna Carta on display in the British pavilion was supposed to go home when the fair closed on October 1. After high-level discussion, however, officials thought it would be safer to let it stay in the United States.*

I’ll defend the girl with my last breath,” he promised, and clasped his hand dramatically to the chest of his ragged frock coat. “Oh, wait. That doesn’t mean much, does it, since I gasped that last breath before the Magna Carta was dry on the page? I mean, of course I’ll look after her, with whatever is left of my life.

Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you? Did she die in vain? That gallant Hungarian peasant girl who forced King John to sign the pledge at Runnymede and closed the boozers at half past ten?

Every generation has the illusion that things were easier and better in a simpler past. Dead wrong. Things are better today than at any time in human history. Our primal ignorance is what keeps us whacking each other over the head with sticks, and not what allows us to paint a Mona Lisa or design a space shuttle. The 'primal ignorance that keeps us happy' gives rise to obesity and global warming, not antibiotics or the Magna Carta. If human kind flourishes rather than flounders over the next thousand years, it will be because we fully embraced learning and reason, and not because we surrendered to some fantasy about returning to a world that never really was.

You, Christopher, with your centuries of Anglo-Saxon freedom behind you, with your Magna Carta engraved upon your heart, cannot understand that we poor barbarians need the stiffness of a uniform to keep us standing upright.

American grammar doesn't have the sturdiness of British grammar (a British advertising man with a proper education can make magazine copy for ribbed condoms sound like the Magna goddam Carta), but it has its own scruffy charm

Overlooked, too, is that the Visigothic Code of Law was, for its time, an impressive document that combined Visigoth practices with Roman law and Christian principles, and that evidences a guiding desire to limit the power of government many centuries before Magna Carta.

¡Así nació la Declaración Balfour, la Carta Magna del pueblo judío! Once La policía de Yemal Pachá encontró a Sarah Ben Canaan en el kibutz de Shoshanna, dos semanas antes de que se cumpliera el plazo para el nacimiento del niño.

headed instead across the field to the Magna Carta memorial, a little open-air rotunda erected in 1957 by the American Bar Association and memorable today as the only decent thing ever done by lawyers.

Uns malucos com versos na cabeça não podem atingi-los, e eles sabem disso e nós sabemos disso; todo mundo sabe disso. Enquanto a maioria da população não andar por aí citando a Magna Carta e a Constituição, tudo bem.

Magna Carta or no, the rights of Americans were not not theirs only because of any ancient “contract.” As James Wilson put it, using ancient legal terms, “The fee simple of freedom and government is declared to be in the people.

They wanted to teach us the meaning of x in relation to pi, as opposed to helping us better understand ourselves and each other. They wanted us to know when the Magna Carta was signed—never mind what it was—as opposed to discussing birth control. We

established under Magna Carta was the right to a trial by jury. For centuries, guilt or innocence had been determined, across Europe, either by a trial by ordeal—a trial by water, for instance, or a trial by fire—or by trial by combat. Trials by ordeal and

Old Rekohu’s claim to singularity, however, lay in its unique pacific creed. Since time immemorial, the Moriori’s priestly caste dictated that whosoever spilt a man’s blood killed his own mana - his honor, his worth, his standing & his soul. No Moriori would shelter, feed, converse with, or even see the persona non grata. If the ostracized murderer survived his first winter, the desperation of solitude usually drove him to a blowhole on Cape Young, where he took his life. Consider this, Mr. D’Arnoq urged us. Two thousand savages (Mr. Evans’s best guess) enshrine “Thou Shalt Not Kill” in word & in deed & frame an oral “Magna Carta” to create a harmony unknown elsewhere for the sixty centuries since Adam first tasted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. War was as alien a concept to the Moriori as the telescope is to the Pygmy. Peace, not a hiatus betwixt wars but millennia of imperishable peace, rules these far-flung islands. Who can deny Old Rekohu lay closer to More’s Utopia than our States of Progress governed by war-hungry princelings in Versailles & Vienna, Washington & Westminster? “Here,” declaimed Mr. D’Arnoq, “and where only, were those elusive phantasms, those noble savages, framed in flesh & blood!” (Henry, as we later made our back to the Musket confessed, “I could never describe a race of savages too backwards to throw a spear as ‘noble.

The fundamental axiom of economics is the human mercenary instinct. Without that assumption, the entire field would collapse. There isn’t any fundamental axiom for sociology yet, but it might be even darker than economics. The truth always picks up dust. A small number of people could fly off into space, but if we knew it would come to that, why would we have bothered in the first place?” “Bothered with what?” “Why would we have had the Renaissance? Why the Magna Carta? Why the French Revolution? If humanity had stayed divided into classes, kept in place by the law’s iron rule, then when the time came, the ones who needed to leave would leave, and the ones who had to stay behind would stay. If this took place in the Ming or Qing Dynasties, then I’d leave, of course, and you’d stay behind. But that’s not possible now.

The 1216 Magna Carta was distinctive in two further regards. It was not a mere peace treaty, extracted under duress from an embattled monarch, but a freely given assurance of rights. Crucially, the document was also issued with the full and unequivocal support of the papal legate, Guala.

It was this document, validated by Guala and Marshal, which resurrected Magna Carta – the discarded pact of 1215. This development represented a critical step in English history, for without this reissue and those that followed in later years, the Great Charter would have been forgotten.

Hassan drafts a Magna Carta and asks that a taxman pass a Tax Act - a cash grab that can tax all farmland and grant a dastard at cards what hard cash Hassan lacks. Hassan asks that an apt draftsman map what ranchland a ranchhand can farm: all grasslands and pampas, all marshlands and swamps, flatlands and savannahs (standard badlands that spawn chaparral and crabgrass). Hassan asks that all farmhands at farms plant flax and award Hassan, as a tax, half what straw a landsman can stash at a barn. A ranchman at a ranch warns campagnards that a shah has spat at hard-and-fast laws that ban cadastral graft.

Minor segments of earlier history may have been rescued or 'retrieved' -- e.g. Greek 'democracy,' Aristotle, the Magna Carta, etc. -- but these remain subservient, if not instrumental, to the imperatives of the modern historical narrative and to the progress of 'Western civilization.' African and Asia, in most cases, continue to struggle in order to catch up, in the process not only forgoeing the privilege of drawing on their own traditions and historical experiences that shaped who they were and, partly, who they have become but also letting themselves be drawn into devastating wars, poverty, disease and the destruction of their natural environment. Modernity, whose hegemonic discourse is determined by the institutions and intellectuals of the powerful modern West, has not offered a fair shake to two-thirds of the world's population, who have lost their history and, with it, their organic ways of existence.

In Magna Carta it is more than once insisted on as the principal bulwark of our liberties; but especially by chap. 29. that no freeman shall be hurt in either his person or property, “nisi per legale judicium parium suorum vel per legem terrae “ ["unless by the lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land"].

Procreative choice is for women an equivalent of the demand for the legally limited working day which Marx saw as the great watershed for factory workers in the nineteenth century. The struggles for that “modest Magna Carta,” as Marx calls it… did not end capitalism, but they changed the relation of the workers to their own lives.

The right to a trial by jury probably became the bedrock of the legal system in May 1215, when landowners, barons as they were known, forced King John at knifepoint to sign the Magna Carta on the meadow at Runnymede. One clause of it read, “(N)o freeman shall be taken or imprisoned or seized or exiled or in any way destroyed...except by the

Privilege is simply the target the progressive left paints on the back of those whose power they want.

Any and all recognition of freedom means recognizing the integrity of the equal freedom of others.

Le dije que en la historia de Venezuela no había una Carta Magna sino una larga sucesión de contratos de adhesión escritos por los caudillos de turno

Barcelona has always been more a city of capital and labor than of nobility and commoners; its democratic roots are old and run very deep. Its medieval charter of citizens’ rights, the Usatges, grew from a nucleus which antedated the Magna Carta by more than a hundred years. Its government, the Consell de Cent (Council of One Hundred), had been the oldest protodemocratic political body in Spain.

The Declaration of Independence is not only an American document. It follows on Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights as the third great title-deed on which the liberties of the English-speaking people are founded…. The political conceptions embodied in the Declaration of Independence are the same as those expressed at that time by Lord Chatham and Mr. Burke and handed down to them by John Hampden and Algernon Sidney.

The Declaration of Independence is not only an American document. It follows on Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights as the third great title-deed on which the liberties of the English-speaking people are founded. By it we lost an Empire, but by it we also preserved an Empire. By applying its principles and learning its lesson we have maintained our communion with the powerful Commonwealths our children have established beyond the seas.

The Genesis declaration carries the central truth that each human person is a precious individual, whether strong or weak, rich or poor, able-bodied or handicapped, intellectually brilliant or limited, beautiful or plain.

Little wonder that one congressman warned that “government by committees, boards, bureaus, and commissions will, if unchecked and uncontrolled, destroy the republican conception of government”—or that a senator deemed one of the agencies a “star chamber,” the arbitrary, juryless court of Stuart despotism, where due process (as first laid out in Magna Carta over 800 years ago and reiterated in the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment) had no place.

The biblical principles upon which our Declaration of Independence and Constitution are based were adapted from British common law, which consisted generally of unwritten laws and customs developed over time in England. This common law derived from both natural law and God’s revealed law in the Bible, and was recognized in the English Magna Carta of 1215, when nobles challenged the king with the concept that he was not the highest ruler in the land.

The most crucial right established under Magna Carta was the right to a trial by jury. For centuries, guilt or innocence had been determined, across Europe, either by a trial by ordeal—a trial by water, for instance, or a trial by fire—or by trial by combat. Trials by ordeal and combat required neither testimony nor questioning. The outcome was, itself, the evidence, the only admissible form of judicial proof, accepted because it placed judgment in the hands of God.

noblemen—“all the liberties written out below, to have and to keep for them and their heirs, of us and our heirs.”33 This was the great charter, the Magna Carta. Magna Carta had been revoked almost immediately after it was written, and it had become altogether obscure by the time of King James and his battles with the ungovernable Edward Coke. But Coke, as brilliant a political strategist as he was a legal scholar, resurrected it in the 1620s and began calling it England’s

Each human person is precious and unique. Each has dignity and worth that is inalienable and must be respected. Each must be valued, not because they are a member of the species Homo sapiens, but as an individual person in their own right.

that he would obey the “law of the land.” Magna Carta wasn’t nearly as important as Coke made it out to be, but by arguing for its importance, he made it important, not only for English history, but for American history, too, tying the political fate of everyone in England’s colonies to the strange doings of a very bad king from the Middle Ages. King John, born in 1166, was the youngest son of Henry II. As a young man, he’d studied with his father’s chief minister, Ranulf de Glanville,

is, not to the people, but to noblemen—“all the liberties written out below, to have and to keep for them and their heirs, of us and our heirs.”33 This was the great charter, the Magna Carta. Magna Carta had been revoked almost immediately after it was written, and it had become altogether obscure by the time of King James and his battles with the ungovernable Edward Coke. But Coke, as brilliant a political strategist as he was a legal scholar, resurrected it in the 1620s and began calling it England’s “ancient

It is difficult to picture the rich, hard-nosed advisors of James I being overly concerned about the rights of vagabonds and felons. But this was a period that was especially suspicious of arbitrary acts by the Crown against individuals. There was no law enabling the crown to exile anyone, including the baser convict, into forced labour. According to legal scholars, the Magna Carta itself protected even them. The Privy Councillors therefore dressed up what was to befall the convicts and presented the decree authorising their transportation as an act of royal mercy. The convicts were to be reprieved from death in exchange for accepting transportation. (71-71)

rights established as far back as Magna Carta. Then, in the longest statement in the draft, Jefferson blamed George III for African slavery, charging the king with waging “cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery,” preventing the colonies from outlawing the slave trade and, “that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us.” This passage Congress struck, unwilling to conjure this assemblage of horrors in the nation’s founding document.

Consider this, Mr. D’Arnoq urged us. Two thousand savages (Mr. Evans’s best guess) enshrine “Thou Shalt Not Kill” in word & in deed & frame an oral “Magna Carta” to create a harmony unknown elsewhere for the sixty centuries since Adam tasted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. War was as alien a concept to the Moriori as the telescope is to the Pygmy. Peace, not a hiatus betwixt wars but millennia of imperishable peace, rules these far-flung islands. Who can deny Old Rēkohu lay closer to More’s Utopia than our States of Progress governed by war-hungry princelings in Versailles & Vienna, Washington & Westminster? “Here,” declaimed Mr. D’Arnoq, “and here only, were those elusive phantasms, the noble savages, framed in flesh & blood!

Appreciation for history is scarce today, public debate is only rarely lit by foundational principles, and there is a further reason why the needed discussion fails to get off the ground—especially in the speech code, cancel culture of many American and European universities. Debate is often ended by prejudice and a fashionable consensus that chokes it off from the start.

America cannot endure permanently half 1776 and half 1789. The compromises, contradictions, hypocrisies, inequities, and evils have built up unaddressed. The grapes of wrath have ripened again, and the choice before America is plain. Either America goes forward best by going back first, or America is about to reap a future in which the worst will once again be the corruption of the best.

The world finds itself torn between the two great bookends of human history, authoritarianism and anarchy. Authoritarianism is the world of order and stability without freedom...Anarchy, on the other hand, is the world of freedom without order and stability...The present challenge is to establish genuine personal freedom and substantially free societies in a generation that pays lip service to freedom while all the time it is pulled toward one or the other of the extremes.

The deepest division is between two mutually exclusive views of America: those who understand America and freedom from the perspective of 1776 and the American Revolution, and those who understand America and freedom from the perspective of 1789 and the French Revolution and its ideological heirs. Such current movements as postmodernism, political correctness, tribal and identity politics, the sexual revolution, critical theory (or grievance studies), and socialism all come down from 1789 and have nothing to do with the ideas of 1776. These movements and

As Rabbi Sacks explains, if God is sovereign and all of life is viewed and lived under God, then two things follow. First, “all human power is delegated, limited, subject to moral constraints.”11 Second, “this has nothing to do with political structures (monarchy, oligarchy, democracy—Jews have tried them all) and everything to do with collective moral responsibility. . . . God has given us freedom; it is for us to use it to create a just, generous, gracious society. God does not do it for us but He teaches us how it is done. As Moses said: The choice is ours.”12

There is no question that the Deep South seceded and fought the civil war to defend slavery. And its leaders made no secret of this motive. Slavery they argued Ad nauseam was the foundation for a virtuous biblically sanctioned social system superior to that of the free states. When 19th century deep southerners spoke of defending their “traditions”, “heritage”, and way of life they proudly identified the enslavement of others as the center piece of all three. Indeed, many of their leaders even argued that all lower class people should be enslaved regardless of race for their own good. In response to Yankee and midland abolitionist the Deep South’s leaders developed an elaborate defense for human bondage. James Henry Hammond, former governor of South Carolina, published a seminal book arguing that enslaved laborers where happier, fitter and better looked after than their free counter parts in Brittan and the North, who were ruthlessly exploited by industrial capitalists. Free societies were therefore unstable as there was always a danger that the exploited would rise up creating a fearful crisis in republican institutions. Salves by contrast were kept in their place by violent means and denied the right to vote, resist or testify, ensuring the foundation of every well designed and durable republic. Enslavement of the white working class would be in his words a most glorious act of emancipation. Jefferson’s notion all men are created equal, he wrote, was ridiculously absurd. In the deep southern tradition, Hammond’s republic was modeled on those of ancient Greece and Rome. Featuring rights and democracy for the elite, slavery and submission for inferiors. It was sanctioned by the Christian god whose son never denounced the practice in his documented teachings. It was a perfect aristocratic republic, one that should be a model for the world. George Fitzhugh endorsed and expanded upon Hammond’s argument to enslave all poor people. Aristocrats, he explained, were really the nations Magna Carta because they owned so much and had the affection which all men feel for what belongs to them. Which naturally lead them to protect and provide for wives, children and slaves. Fitzhugh, whose books were enormously popular declared he was quite as intent on abolishing free society as you northerners are on abolishing slavery.

When King John was angry, he threw himself down and rolled the floor, yelling and chewing the expensive oriental rugs that Crusaders had brought back from the East.

Aunt Ruth, who now lived with us, had seemed to become younger as the years went on. She had lived alone for so many years and I was her only family. Our letters, when I was in exile, had brought us close but it was since I had become lord of Stockton that she had become rejuvenated. Perhaps that was my children. I had four. Alfred, Rebekah, Isabelle and another son William who was now almost a year old. To my aunt this was a joy. Her husband, Sir Ralph, had been killed a few years after she had married. She had lost one child and never had another. My family became the family she never had and she spent as much time as my wife would allow with them. She came to me one evening after the children had been put to bed and my wife was telling the girls a story. “You know Thomas that I count myself the luckiest woman alive. I lost the only man I thought I could

the throne and I have ensured that we are prepared should the worst happen in the future.” I looked around. Although I trusted all of my servants if one of King John’s spies heard my aunt he might deem it to be treasonous. “Do not fret, Aunt, I have also hidden coin. We will not have to be wanderers again.” She nodded, “Then you should know where my treasure is hidden, should … well I am no longer young.” I was about to speak and she held up her hand. “I am not a fool. God has taken everyone that I love save you and your family. One day he will take me.” She handed me a parchment. “William and I buried the chests so

On the third morning of the riots Burdett saw a constable, balanced on a ladder, peering through his library windows, and heard soldiers break in downstairs: he was arrested reading the Magna Carta to his son, an aptly dramatic scene. He was then taken to the Tower in a coach guarded by six hundred cavalrymen wielding sabres.

THERE ISN’T A historian the last five centuries who could argue against the idea that Luther’s stand that day at Worms—before the assembled powers of the empire, and against the theological and political and ecclesiastical order that had reigned for centuries, and therefore against the whole of the medieval world—was one of the most significant moments in history. It ranks with the 1066 Norman Conquest and the 1215 signing of the Magna Carta and the 1492 landing of Columbus in the New World. And in its way, it far outweighs all of those historic moments. If ever there was a moment where it can be said the modern world was born, and where the future itself was born, surely it was in that room on April 18 at Worms.

—Juro delante de Dios, juro delante de la Patria, juro delante de mi pueblo que sobre esta moribunda Constitución haré cumplir, impulsaré las transformaciones democráticas necesarias para que la República nueva tenga una Carta Magna adecuada a los nuevos tiempos. Lo juro.

There’s a Gutenberg Bible in there. Not to mention four original copies of the Magna Carta.

Magna Carta guarantees due process of law. You cannot have your life removed, you cannot have your money removed, your freedom removed, except by a trial by jury of your peers, and you could be represented by legal counsel

among the documents he preserved were at least two, possibly three, of the original thirteenth-century official copies of Magna Carta,

Postmodernism provides another popular alibi for bowing to the idol of freedom. God is dead, and truth is dead, it claims, so the ultimate determinant in society is power. But if all relations are negotiated solely by power, the best protection against the unwanted power of others is to approach everyone with suspicion (the infamous “hermeneutics of suspicion”). The outcome is an aging society fueled by pervasive suspicion, mistrust, rumor, conspiracy theories, and cynicism.

Uma coisa era o papa Inocêncio III declarar a Magna Carta nula de pleno direito em 1215, porque violava a ordem divinamente instituída da hierarquia, e outra bem diferente o Vaticano, em seu instrumentum laboris para o sínodo europeu de 1999, igualar o pluralismo com o marxismo. É impossível reconciliar uma rejeição do pluralismo com um autêntico compromisso com a democracia, e permanece perigosa uma devoção católica à erradicação do pluralismo. A política interna da Igreja tem relevância aqui, porque o uso de anátemas, banimentos e excomunhões para impor uma disciplina intelectual rigidamente controlada na Igreja revela uma instituição que ainda tem contas a acertar com ideias básicas como a liberdade de consciência e a natureza dialética da investigação racional.

In the end he slunk out of Normandy in December 1203, like a thief in the night.

JAY: How significantly different would a Clinton White House, Obama White House, or an Edwards White House—how much can they do? How much do they want to do differently? VIDAL: It’s too broken. The first thing you have to do is get back habeas corpus. You’ve got to get back the Magna Carta, you’ve got to get back our legal system, you’ve got to get back the pillars of the Constitution, and they’re gone. Republics don’t restore themselves.

He had a good memory and knowledge of history, and could converse with people of education, although his tastes weren’t that highbrow. His favourite court jester was one Roland the Farter, who was given a manor in Suffolk on condition that every Christmas he ‘gave a jump, a whistle and a fart before Henry and his courtiers’. The

On one Easter service, when St Hugh of Lincoln was giving the homily, John sent the bishop three notes telling him to hurry up so he could go to lunch.

It looks like they want to silence women and unions everywhere. And what's it for but money? People are awfully funny. Always thinking lots of money makes them special, and thus superior, and so they ought to exercise the superiority. It's a wonder they don't try to revoke the Magna Carta.

What we are proposing,' Alicia said, 'is that the laws of physics are such that causality violation is subject to a form of version control, one that prevents a forking of history. That instead of causality violation creating an alternate universe, one version of history is outright overwritten by another. One past is replaced with another future. Which means that the memories of the past of the people in that future are replaced with memories of a different past.' Carson interrupted. 'Including the memories of any—' 'Purely hypothetical—' '—time travelers.' 'So take our time traveler from the traditional story,' Carson continued. 'He leaves his utopian future for the past. He kills the butterfly. The Magna Carta is never written. He returns to the dystopian future that his misstep created. But he doesn't see it as a dystopia: he sees it as home, the world he grew up in, the world he left to go back in time. Because he doesn't remember that first future, and has no other world to which he can compare this one. Maybe he even sees it as a utopia. Maybe everyone does. Maybe everyone in this dark place believes that they live in the best of all possible worlds.

Can't I be purple?" Lady Alexandra asked. Billie looked at her as if she'd asked to have the Magna Carta revised.

Thrive supports a radical transformation that would bring about a world in which public schools, universities, the social safety net, and even basic public infrastructures like roads and utilities have all been privatized. Instead of police, we would have private security forces. As Foster Gamble, creator of Thrive, states, “Private security works way better than the state” (especially if they are hired to specifically protect just you and your entourage). The civil court systems, which have provided the foundation for justice for the Anglo-American civilization since the Magna Carta, would be abolished in favor of private courts, in which competing legal claims would be adjusted against our personal legal insurance. The outcomes might be less desirable if you can’t afford your private legal insurance bill.

Later he worked with E.P. Thompson at the Centre for the Study of Social History at the University of Warwick to learn the art and craft of ‘people’s remembrancing’ which has taken printed results in Albion’s Fatal Tree, The London Hanged, The Many-Headed Hydra, Magna Carta Manifesto, and Stop, Thief!

It isn't what happens that is important . . . it's how you deal with it Always J T Coombes Global Magna Carta Returning Power to teh 99% . . . If they want it!

parchment challenged absolute authority again and again, most notably in the terrible and bloody British civil wars in the 1640s, when Magna Carta went face to face against the authority of a divinely appointed king, Charles I. And the law won. The king was tried, judged and executed. In those wars, people were dragged to the gallows holding copies of Magna Carta. It became as sacred as the Christian cross. The Great Charter itself

Eight centuries on from Magna Carta, the potential to follow every last electronic trace rewrites the contract between citizen and state.

Three factors greatly facilitated the emergence of more inclusive political institutions following the Glorious Revolution and the French Revolution. The first was new merchants and businessmen wishing to unleash the power of creative destruction from which they themselves would benefit; these new men were among the key members of the revolutionary coalitions and did not wish to see the development of yet another set of extractive institutions that would again prey on them. The second was the nature of the broad coalition that had formed in both cases. For example, the Glorious Revolution wasn’t a coup by a narrow group or a specific narrow interest, but a movement backed by merchants, industrialists, the gentry, and diverse political groupings. The same was largely true for the French Revolution. The third factor relates to the history of English and French political institutions. They created a background against which new, more inclusive regimes could develop. In both countries there was a tradition of parliaments and power sharing going back to the Magna Carta in England and to the Assembly of Notables in France. Moreover, both revolutions happened in the midst of a process that had already weakened the grasp of the absolutist, or aspiring absolutist, regimes. In neither case would these political institutions make it easy for a new set of rulers or a narrow group to take control of the state and usurp existing economic wealth and build unchecked and durable political power.

I was born into a family of swinging fists and bellowing voices, but when I opened the pages of a book I found men of valor. To anyone watching, it probably looked like I was reading a book in the front room of my father's house, but I was really in Paris, fighting alongside the three musketeers. Or twenty thousand leagues under the sea, or racing around the world in eighty days. They led me to the Holy Grail and to the Sermon on the Mount. Reading was my liberation, my Magna Carta, from hopelessness and tyranny.

English law in the 15th and 16th centuries, despite being manipulated in favour of the king, did to some extent offer protection against arbitrary arrest and imprisonment. Death sentences could in theory only be imposed after lawful judgment. Slavery had no recognition in English law. Torture remained an extra-legal resort, at odds with legal principle.

Trump was coming under fire because his campaign hadn’t produced a single policy paper. So Bannon arranged for Nunberg and Ann Coulter, the conservative pundit, to quickly produce a white paper on Trump’s immigration policies. (When the campaign released it, Coulter, without disclosing her role, tweeted that it was “the greatest political document since the Magna Carta.”)

The Koran likewise. The Magna Carta. The American Constitution. Billions of people govern their lives by those words. Society has been altered by them.

The people of God are to be an anti-Egypt, an anti-Babylon, and counterculture to all the cultures from the Greeks to the Romans to the Spanish, the French, the British, the Americans, the Russians, and the Chinese. Called to be countercultural, it is a travesty when the people of God become the holy oil sprinkled on the status quo, the religious rationale for bolstering cultures under stress and a vile travesty if ever they become flowers on the chains that oppress.

The Lord who is “I am who I am” and “I will be who I will be” is not mocked. God respects our freedom—even to reject him. But God is no less central, essential, and inescapable when he is rejected than when he reveals himself in the full reality of his presence.

Whatever people may feel about themselves, however humans may treat their fellow humans, and whichever human view of humanity may be dominant in one generation or another, or one society or another, God has made his position clear. He has created human beings in his image, and each one must therefore be seen and treated as unique, precious and the bearer of dignity and worth that is inalienable. It is quite wrong to think that special means speciesism. Even if a person is poor, uneducated, disabled, or mentally impaired, he or she is still created in the image of God and therefore precious and unique. Each individual human is exceptional. None is ever expendable. Made in the image of God, every single human person is special, singular, and significant.

Whatever people may feel about themselves, however humans may treat their fellow humans, and whichever human view of humanity may be dominant in one generation or another, or one society or another, God has made his position clear. He has created human beings in his image, and each one must therefore be seen and treated as unique, precious and the bearer of dignity and worth that is inalienable.

Freedom means and requires responsibility, but the responsibility of freedom can be a burden and even cause suffering. At some point, down in the dark labyrinths where we humans rationalize our evasions of responsibility, things become twisted. People who desire to evade responsibility get to the point where there appears to be tyranny in freedom, because of its responsibility, and freedom in tyranny, because there is no responsibility required, only dependency. The result grows into a fear of freedom that ends in a desire for freedom from freedom.

Freedom is so elemental to human life that it is not surprising that the irony of freedom is itself elemental. The great paradox of freedom is that the greatest enemy of freedom is freedom. No one and nothing enslaves free people as much as they enslave themselves.

Intimacy with the Lord without distraction would also mean greater availability for the service of the Lord, his people, and his kingdom, as the Christian experience of millennia has shown. Reflection and Application (7:25–35) This passage, along with Jesus’ commendation of celibacy (Matt 19:12), forms the Magna Carta of the consecrated life. It is primarily a declaration of independence and freedom. The great good of charity, the love of God, which alone outlasts the changing scenery of this world, is worth committing oneself to in celibate consecration as a state of life. If Paul coincides with Plato in saying that the figure of this world is passing away, he does not make the philosophical principle of the changeableness of temporal things the main motive for his praise of virginity. Rather, we are living in a segment of time marked at either end by the Christ event. In the resurrection, which is behind us, the glorious consummation of salvation is forecast and guaranteed. Thus we are living in a new kind of time, because its goal as well as its beginning has been revealed. So radically has the meaning of time been changed that unnecessary involvement in essentially transitory states can be a curtailment of freedom. Virginity, then, is the visible symbol of Christ’s lordship over time.

numerous castles and fiefs

This ad in the middle was placed by some arm of the G-5-to-be, trying to round up a few 're-education' experts. Vital, vital stuff. Teach the German Beast about the Magna Carta, sportsmanship, that sort of thing, eh? Out inside the works of some neurotic Bavarian cuckoo clock of a village, were-elves streaking in out of the forests at night to leave subversive handbills at door and window—'Anything!' Roger groping back to his narrow quarters, 'anything at all's better than this. . . .

usted, ciudadano Sieyès, que un hombre de honor, que tenga talento y cierta capacidad, aceptará holgazanear en Versalles como un cerdo cebado?». Rechazada su idea, Sieyès propuso entonces mantener la figura de los tres cónsules iguales. Fue el momento de Napoleón, su contrapropuesta era clara: debía existir un primer cónsul responsable de adoptar las decisiones, mientras los otros dos pasaban a desempeñar el papel de consejeros. Sieyès, muy a su pesar, hubo de plegarse a las directrices de Bonaparte. La cuarta constitución francesa desde 1789 podía al fin redactarse. La que se denominaría Constitución del año VIII señaló que los tres cónsules serían elegidos cada diez años, con posibilidad de reelección. En principio, el nuevo Senado sería el encargado de su nombramiento, pero en prevención de cualquier contingencia, establecieron que los nombres de ellos tres figurasen ya en la nueva carta magna. Del mismo modo, quedó escrito que Napoleón Bonaparte sería el primer cónsul, con facultades para designar ministros y buena parte de los jueces principales. El poder legislativo quedó formado por tres asambleas: un Consejo de Estado, designado por el primer cónsul, cuya finalidad sería redactar las leyes; un Tribunado de cien miembros con la evanescente función de «discutir» las leyes; y un Cuerpo Legislativo de trescientos miembros encargado de aprobarlas. Habría además un

The old man’s head was propped, rather precariously, on top of the body of an even older man. It was tiny, thin and stooped and had little more substance than the branches of the willow.

Hoy las normas legales están tan inmersas en la cultura que incluso los términos de servicio de Facebook son más extensos que la Carta Magna

The expansion of the Fearless Flyer to twenty pages was an important factor in the jump of Trader Joe’s sales after 1985. Down deep, the Fearless Flyer was an educational medium and hundreds of customers kept three-ring notebook collections of the issues so they could refer back to the articles. For years, we printed three rings on the cover. Equally important, however, it was an educational medium for our employees: A lot of our employees were under twenty-one; legally they could not have tasted the wines we were selling. So the Fearless Flyer was a sales tool for those employees. As we got deeper and deeper into vitamins, and FDA got goosier and goosier about claims by the health food industry, I didn’t want our employees to do any selling of vitamins and food supplements. When asked about a product, they were to refer to the Fearless, and a back copy file was kept at the store level for this purpose. (In 1993, Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah rammed a Magna Carta for health foods through Congress. The FDA hates the law, but all kinds of claims can be made now, which were impossible in my era.)

The English aristocracy knew better how to work together; the reason perhaps being that, whereas in France the parliament passed into the hands of the lawyers and so became an instrument of the crown, in England it remained an organ of the social authorities and a rallying-point for their opposition. So well did it understand the art of giving to its resistance a plausible show of public advantage that the Magna Carta, to take one instance, though in reality nothing more than a capitulation of the king to vested interests acting in their own defence, contained phrases about law and liberty which are valid for all time. Whereas the French nobles got themselves known to the people as petty tyrants, often more unruly and exacting than a great one would be, the English nobles managed to convey to the yeoman class of free proprietors the feeling that they too were aristocrats on a small scale, with interests to defend in common with the nobles. This island English aristocracy achieved its master-stroke in 1689. With Harrington rather than John Locke for inspiration, it riveted on the Power given the king whom it had brought from overseas limits so cleverly contrived that they were to last a long time. The essential instrument of Power is the army. An article of the Bill of Rights made standing armies illegal, and the Mutiny Act sanctioned courts martial and imposed military discipline for the space of only a year; in this way, the government was compelled to summon Parliament every year to bring the army to life again, as it were, when it was on the verge of legal dissolution. Hence the fact that, even today, there are the “Royal” Navy and the “Royal” Air Force, but not the “Royal” Army. In this way, the tradition of the Army's dependence on Parliament is preserved.

Political authority, the authority of the State, may arise in a number of possible ways: in Locke's phrase, for instance, a father may become the "politic monarch" of an extended family; or a judge may acquire kingly authority in addition, as in Herodotus' tale. Whatever its first origin, political authority tends to include all four pure types of authority. Medieval scholastic teachings of the divine right of kings display this full extent of political authority. Even in this context, however, calls for independence of the judicial power arose, as exemplified by the Magna Carta; in this way the fact was manifested that the judge's authority, rooted in Eternity, stands apart from the three temporal authorities, which more easily go together, of father, master, and leader. The medieval teaching of the full extent of political authority is complicated and undermined by the existence of an unresolved conflict, namely that arising between ecclesiastical and state power, between Pope and Emperor, on account of the failure to work out an adequate distinction between the political and the ecclesiastical realms. The teachings of absolutism by thinkers such as Bodin and Hobbes resolved this conflict through a unified teaching of sovereignty that removed independent theological authority from the political realm. In reaction to actual and potential abuses of absolutism, constitutional teachings arose (often resting on the working hypothesis of a "social contract") and developed—most famously in Montesquieu—a doctrine of "separation of powers." This new tradition focused its attention on dividing and balancing political power, with a view to restricting it from despotic or tyrannical excess. Kojève makes the astute and fascinating observation that in this development from absolutism to constitutionalism, the authority of the father silently drops out of the picture, without any detailed analysis or discussion; political authority comes to be discussed as a combination of the authority of judge, leader, and master, viewed as judicial power, legislative power, and executive power. In this connection, Kojève makes the conservative or traditionalist Hegelian suggestion that, with the authority of the father dropped from the political realm, the political authority, disconnected from its past, will have a tendency towards constant change.

Anyone who has heard from childhood of Magna Carta, who has read with what interest and reverence one copy of it was lately received in New York, and takes it up for the first time, will be strangely disappointed, and may find himself agreeing with the historian who proposed to translate its title not as the Great Charter of Liberties, but the Long List of Privileges—privileges of the nobility at the expense of the State. The reason is that our notion of law is wholly different from that of our ancestors.

The recidivists think their rap sheets have the historical importance of the Magna Carta; their jailhouse tats are the equivalent of military citations.

So long as John remained on the throne, this delicately poised status quo remained in place: with his death, however, it broke down, and new policies began instead to highlight the chasm between native Irish and colonists. Almost immediately, for example, the new statutes of Magna Carta came into effect: the rights of landowners and nobles in the lands settled by the Anglo-Normans were thus guaranteed – but the charter did not extend to the Irish themselves.

Without a belief in God and the soul, where is the oath? Without the oath, where is the obligation or the pressure to fulfill it? Where is the law that even kings must obey? Where is the Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus, or The bill of Rights? (All of which arose out of attempts to rule by lawless tyranny.) Where is the lifelong fidelity of husband and wife? Where is the safety of the innocent child growing in the womb? Where, in the end, is the safety for any of us from those currently bigger and stronger than we are? And how striking it is that such oaths we use to make us better, not worse.

The Magna Carta, the Great Charter confirmed by John at Runnymede, bears the date June 15, 1215;