Justice & Law Quote by Hubert H. Humphrey

Humphrey’s line is a warning disguised as common sense: coercion has limits, legitimacy doesn’t. It’s not a starry-eyed civics lesson about “the will of the people”; it’s a hard-nosed political calculation from a liberal Cold War pragmatist who knew that state power, stretched too far, starts to look like occupation. By stacking “not enough jails, not enough police, not enough courts,” he turns the machinery of punishment into an image of scarcity. The state can expand, but it can’t expand infinitely, and it can’t surveil or prosecute its way to consent without bankrupting itself morally and materially.

The subtext is a rebuke to lawmakers who confuse passage with governance. You can write a statute into existence and still fail to make it real if ordinary people won’t comply, juries won’t convict, local officials won’t prioritize enforcement, and communities won’t treat the law as authoritative. That’s why the line still fits everything from Prohibition to marijuana bans to today’s fights over abortion, immigration, and policing: enforcement is downstream of social buy-in. When buy-in collapses, discretion and selective punishment rush in, and the law becomes less a rule than a weapon.

Context matters: Humphrey was a New Deal liberal and civil-rights advocate operating in an era when the federal government was aggressively redefining its relationship to citizens. The quote argues for a democratic feedback loop: if you want durable law, you don’t just threaten people into obedience; you persuade, you build coalitions, you make the law feel like “ours,” not “theirs.”