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Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.
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Though similar remarks are often attributed to Bismarck, this is the earliest known quote regarding laws and sausages, and is attributed to John Godfrey Saxe University Chronicle. University of Michigan (27 March 1869) books.google and "Quote... Misquote" by Fred R. Shapiro in The New York Times (21 July 2008); according to Shapiro's research, such remarks only began to be attributed to Bismarck in the 1930s.
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If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made.
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Laws are like sausages — it is best not to see them being made.
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Laws are like sausages. It is better not to see them being made.
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Laws are like sausages. You should never see them made.
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Laws are like sausages. You should never watch them being made.
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Law and sausage are two things you do not want to see being made.
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No one should see how laws or sausages are made.
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To retain respect for sausages and laws, one must not watch them in the making.
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The making of laws like the making of sausages, is not a pretty sight.
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Je weniger die Leute darüber wissen, wie Würste und Gesetze gemacht werden, desto besser schlafen sie nachts.
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The less the people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they sleep in the night.
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(No citation exists for where this German phrase or this translation originated).

 

Otto von Bismarck

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This case, involving legal requirements for the content and labeling of meat products such as frankfurters, affords a rare opportunity to explore simultaneously both parts of Bismarck's aphorism that 'No man should see how laws or sausages are made.'

 

Antonin Scalia

 

A people is not led according to its will; the democratic formula; nor according to the will of one individual: the dictatorial formula. But according to laws. I do not talk here of man-made laws. There are norms, natural laws of life; and there are norms, natural laws of death. Laws of life and laws of death. A nation is headed for life or death according to its respect for one or the other of these laws.

 

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

 

It has always seemed to me that the social order was implicit in the very nature of things, and required nothing more from the human spirit than care in arranging the various elements; that a people could be governed without being made thralls or libertines or victims thereby; that man was born for peace and liberty, and became miserable and cruel only through the action of insidious and oppressive laws. And I believe therefore that if man be given laws which harmonize with the dictates of nature and of his heart he will cease to be unhappy and corrupt.

 

Louis Antoine de Saint-Just

 

Every man, in proportion to his virtue, considers himself, with respect to the great community of mankind, as the steward and guardian of their interests in the property which he chances to possess. Every man, in proportion to his wisdom, sees the manner in which it is his duty to employ the resources which the consent of mankind has intrusted to his discretion.

 

Percy Bysshe Shelley