100 Quotes About Law

I have gained this by philosophy … I do without being ordered what some are constrained to do by their fear of the law. Aristotle

Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias. Learned Hand

I was glad that our venerable, almost formless religions, drained of all intransigence and purged of savage rites, linked us mysteriously to the most ancient secrets of man and of earth, not forbidding us, however, a secular explanation of facts and a rational view of human conduct. Marguerite Yourcenar

As soon as you say, 'I'm going to use the legal system to impose my will on you, ' you're buying into a lie, ' schlichtmann said. 'You'll get chaos, and the system will dissapoint you. You'll get decision-making that only makes sense in Bedlam. We think the legal system is there for us, but it's not. It's there only for itself. Dan Fagin

If legislation is truly necessary, one would expect the government to be able to provide proof of this beyond anecdote and speculation. Such proof is the least we can expect before we accept a government restriction of liberty as legitimate. Randy E. Barnett

But freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order. Robert Jackson

Civilisation and the life of nations are governed by the same laws as prevail throughout nature and organic life. Ernst Haeckel

So the next day I asked Dan how is it that Bubba can get killed, and what kind of half assed nature law would allow that. He thought about it for a while, and said, 'Well, I'll tell you, Forrest, all of these laws are not specially pleasing to us. But there is laws nonetheless. Like when a tiger pounce on a monkey in the jungle - bad for the money, but good for the tiger. That is just the way it is. Winston Groom

Life with a man is more businesslike after it, and money matters work better. And then, you see, if you have rows, and he turns you out of doors, you can get the law to protect you, which you can't otherwise, unless he half-runs you through with a knife, or cracks your noddle with a poker. And if he bolts away from you-- I say it friendly, as woman to woman, for there's never any knowing what a man med do-- you'll have the sticks o' furniture, and won't be looked upon as a thief. Thomas Hardy

Musical innovation is full of danger to the State, for when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them. Plato

Tyranny is the exercise of some power over a man, which is not warranted by law, or necessary for the public safety. A people can never be deprived of their liberties, while they retain in their own hands, a power sufficient to any other power in the state. Noah Webster

Laws decide wich forms of oppression are allowed, Lord. And because of that, those laws are servants to those in power, for whom oppression is given as a right over those who have little or no power. Steven Erikson

What sort of world is it at all? Men on the moon and men spinning round the earth like it might be midges round a lamp, and there's not no attention paid to earthly law nor order no more. Anthony Burgess

Useless laws weaken the necessary laws. Montesquieu

I'm an 'intelligent' sociopath. I don't have problems with drugs, I don't commit crimes, I don't take pleasure in hurting people, and I don't typically have relationship problems. I do have a complete lack of empathy. But I consider that an advantage, most of the time. Do I know the difference between right and wrong, and do I want to be good? Sure.. A peaceful and orderly world is a more comfortable world for me to live in. So do I avoid breaking the law because it's 'right'? No, I avoid breaking the law because it makes sense. . M.E. Thomas

The law was not society, it began. Society was people like himself and Owen and Brillhart, who hadn't the right to take the life of another member of society. And yet the law did. "And yet the law is supposed to be the will of society at least. It isn't even that. Or maybe it is collectively, " he added, aware that as always he was doubling back before he come to a point, making things as complex as possible in trying to make them certain. Patricia Highsmith

It's significantly more satisfying to kick a wall than it is to kick thin air. For the rebellious teen- or the teen who wants to feel like a rebel- a clearly defined law gives you something to define yourself against. Robin Wasserman

Then Anu and Bel called by name me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, who feared God, to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak. Unknown

All men are what they are by reasons of the laws they keep and the thoughts they think. Ogwo David Emenike

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread. Anatole France

The provisions for the poor which structure both land ownership and the sacred calendar in ancient Israel, the rights of gleaners and of those widows, orphans, and strangers who pass through the fields, and the cycles of freedom from debt and restoration of alienated persons and property, all work against the emergence of the poor as a class, as people marked by deprivation and hopelessness. Marilynne Robinson

When mores are sufficient, laws are unnecessary; when mores are insufficient, laws are unenforceable. Unknown

If laws were real they wouldn’t need to be enforced, because if they were real they couldn’t be broken. Try breaking the law of gravity. Now that’s a law. Laws made by man are rules reflecting the current status of his moral codes. As he alters and whittles away his morality, casting bits and pieces aside, his codes change to reflect it. Boyd Rice

It's because even a good man can't always be right, that we need ... rules. John Irving

No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a certain degree, but the safest way to make them respected is to make them respectable. When the law and morality are in contradiction to each other, the citizen finds himself in the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense, or of losing his respect for the law--two evils of equal magnitude, between which it would be difficult to choose. It is so much in the nature of law to support justice that in the minds of the masses they are one and the same. Bastiat

Are we really moral monkeys? I don't think so. We only strike the nihilist pose selectively, to put to shame rules we no longer try to keep. When it suits us, we can be quite Puritanical: Right and wrong are in the eye of the beholder, .' The veneer is skeptical, but the core is rigid and punitive. The whole affair looks more like a fence around conduct that cannot bear close examination, than like a serious intellectual position. The whole idea of a moral law is that it binds us whether we like it or not. If it really were just a social convention —< then it wouldn't be morality. >St. Thomas denies that the basic structure of morality is a construct. It is not rooted in human will and power. Rather it is rooted in nature, in structure of creation, in the constitution of the human person — in something we cannot change by human will and power. The good and the right are not things we invent, but things we discover. They are not constructs, but gifts. These gifts are the fount of the law. . J. Budziszewski

If you notice, the moral law in the other legal codes separates people (the Laws of Manu, the caste system, the Code of Hammurabi with the slave/owner distinction). In Islam, the violator is inferior to the obedient one. By contrast, in the Hebrew-Christian tradition, the law unifies people. No one is made righteous before God by keeping the law. It is only following redemption that we can truly understand the moral law for what it is---a mirror that indicts and calls the heart to seek God's help. This makes moral reasoning the fruit of spiritual understanding and not the cause of it. Ravi Zacharias

The argument that personal moral views should not be imposed on others when it comes to lawmaking is incoherent and misleading. It is incoherent because a great deal of law implicitly "imposes" a particular moral view on the wider society. It would be disingenuous to pretend that the legalization of abortion on demand or euthanasia does not impose a certain moral view on the rest of society. This is especially true when arguments for abortion and euthanasia are based on rights. The appeal to rights is a moral argument, and it is this appeal to moral authority that gives force to laws enshrining rights. George Cardinal Pell

Sometimes a policeman must confront people about lying. No one likes to be called a liar. But it is what it is! A fact is a fact! If someone is a liar, put them on notice. You should not be punished for doing the right thing. It is the job of a good investigator to get the truth. C. Snyder

A common and natural result of an undue respect of law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. Henry David Thoreau

Thus, dear friends, I have said it clearly enough, and I believe you ought to understand it and not make liberty a law... Martin Luther

The Supreme Court of the United States is no longer a court of law. It is a forum of legal fad and fashion. A.E. Samaan

To violate the law of love is to live in un-forgiveness Sunday Adelaja

You ironically have to have a very strong ego structure to let go of your ego. You need to struggle with the rules more than a bit before you throw them out. You only internalize values by butting up against external values for a while. Richard Rohr

The further from law you move, the closer to claw you come. Agona Apell

We may brave human laws, but we cannot resist natural ones. Jules Verne

Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through. Jonathan Swift

All love is expansion, all selfishness is contraction. Love is therefore the only law of life. He who loves lives, he who is selfish is dying. Therefore love for love's sake, because it is the only law of life, just as you breathe to live. Swami Vivekananda

If you have ten thousand regulations you destroy all respect for the law. Winston S. Churchill

And although I broke a lot of laws as a teenager, I straightened out immediately upon turning eighteen, when I realized the state had a legal right to execute me. George Carlin

The minute you read something that you can't understand, you can almost be sure that it was drawn up by a lawyer. Will Rogers

Law applied to its extreme is the greatest injustice Marcus Tullius Cicero

For a lawyer to do less than his utmost is, I strongly feel, a betrayal of his client. Though in criminal trials one tends to focus on the defense attorney and his client the accused, the prosecutor is also a lawyer, and he too has a client: the People. And the People are equally entitled to their day in court, to a fair and impartial trial, and to justice. Vincent Bugliosi

Now, legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways. Thus we have an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, benefits, subsidies, encouragements, progressive taxation, public schools, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, a right to the tools of labor, free credit, and so on, and so on. Unknown

Those fellows, they're always crying over killers. Never a thought for the victims. Truman Capote

The Odyssey is the story of motion both purposeful and purposeless, successful and futile. What else is the history of law? Bernhard Schlink

It seemed to me that if the lawyers failed to do their duty, they ought to pay people for waiting upon them, instead of making them pay for it. R.D. Blackmore

Law cannot reach where enforcement will not follow. –Popular aphorism. Jack Vance

We are bound by the law, so that we may be free. Marcus Tullius Cicero

If you want good laws, burn those you have and make new ones. Voltaire

How can you pass laws about things that nobody knows?"" They do it all the time, " says Hayden. "That's what law is: educated guesses at right and wrong. Neal Shusterman

I’m seventeen years old, my name is Juan García Madero, and I’m in my first semester of law school. I wanted to study literature, not law, but my uncle insisted, and in the end I gave in. I’m an orphan, and someday I’ll be a lawyer. That’s what I told my aunt and uncle, and then I shut myself in my room and cried all night. Unknown

Judges.. are picked out from the most dextrous lawyers, who are grown old or lazy, and having been biased all their lives against truth or equity, are under such a fatal necessity of favoring fraud, perjury and oppression, that I have known several of them to refuse a large bribe from the side where justice lay, rather than injure the faculty by doing any thing unbecoming their nature in office. Jonathan Swift

Justice is the insurance which we have on our lives and property. Obedience is the premium which we pay for it. William Penn

Every lawyer shall tell his or her client that becoming involved with the legal system is like three years of experimental chemotherapy, one hundred percent guaranteed not to work. Lawrence Joseph

All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them. Felix Frankfurter

Every once in a while I don't think it's a bad idea for lawyers to remember that what goes on, at least on some level of our brains, is that we have to imagine everything coming apart.... It's what we are. Out of control, always prepared, Boy Scout control freaks. Lawrence Joseph

Then our crime's worse than a murderer's. His act puts him outside the law, but keeps the law intact. Ours would weaken the law. Unknown

I once knew a fellow who committed robbery with violence, and he was sentenced to a long prison stretch and 12 strokes of the cat. He'd been injured during the robbery, so they put him in hospital to make him better so that they could make him worse. During the administration of the cat, he fainted after six strokes, and the doctor put him in hospital again. And he got very friendly with the nurses and the doctors, and after a while they got him well enough to go back and take the next six strokes. I saw him afterward and I said: "Oh, Jesus–that bloody law, that bloody judge! " But he said: "I don't want the fellow who made the law, and I don't want the fellow who passed the sentence. All I want is the fellow who held the bloody whip. Peter OToole

The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings. Viewed by this light it becomes a coherent scheme, and not the monstrous maze the laity are apt to think it. Let them but once clearly perceive that its grand principle is to make business for itself at their expense, and surely they will cease to grumble. . Charles Dickens

Laws change more slowly than custom, and though dangerous when they fall behind the times are more dangerous still when the presume to anticipate custom. Marguerite Yourcenar

Overregulation corrupts citizens and weakens the rule of law. Lawrence Lessig

If you let loose a law, it willdo as a dog does. It will obey its own nature, not yours. Suchsense as you have put into the law (or the dog) will be fulfilled. But you will not be able to fulfil a fragment of anything you haveforgotten to put into it. G.k. Chesterton

I assure you the law isn't a line engraved in marble, immovable and unchangeable through the centuries. Rather...the law is like a string, fixed at both ends but with a great deal of play in it-very loose, the line of the law-so you can stretch it this way or that, rearrange the arc of it so you are always-short of the blantant theft or cold-blooded murder-safely on the right side. Dean Koontz

It is emphatically the province and duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is. John Marshall

I do not think that illegal plunder, such as theft or swindling – which the penal code defines, anticipates, and punishes – can be called socialism. It is not this kind of plunder that systematically threatens the foundations of society. Anyway, the war against this kind of plunder has not waited for the command of these gentlemen. The war against illegal plunder has been fought since the beginning of the world. Long before the Revolution of February 1848 – long before the appearance even of socialism itself – France had provided police, judges, gendarmes, prisons, dungeons, and scaffolds for the purpose of fighting illegal plunder. The law itself conducts this war, and it is my wish and opinion that the law should always maintain this attitude toward plunder. Unknown

Current science and technology have unlocked all mysteries. We make sense of it in a gradual process under law and order. Toba Beta

[Justice George Sutherland said, in the majority opinion for the Carter Coal case] 'One who does a thing in order to avoid a monetary penalty does not agree; he yields to compulsion precisely the same as though he did so to avoid a term in jail. Jim Powell

We desire justice, and justice has never been obtained in haste and strong feeling. Unknown

I have one weapon, " Mason said. "It's a powerful weapon. But sometimes it's hard to wield it because you don't know just where to grab hold of it."" What weapon is that?" Della Street asked." The truth, " Mason said. Erle Stanley Gardner

A state which savagely represses or persecutes sections of its people cannot in my view be regarded as observing the rule of law, even if the transport of the persecuted minority to the concentration camp or the compulsory exposure of female children on the mountainside is the subject of detailed laws duly enacted and scrupulously observed. Tom Bingham

At the end of the day you are your own lawmaker Bangambiki Habyarimana

Do you want to know about what is consideration contract law? Contact My Law Tutors, we are law tuition provider. Our skilled staff can teach you a-level revision about contract law. My Law Tutors

All obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency. George Washington

THE MAIN DUTY OF LAW enforcement is law breaking. Right now the disciplined forces jobs are the reserve of the ‘elite’ and security has little meaning, money is the arbiter of law breaking. Vincent De Paul

God has given his law so that we will experience, not earn, the good he intends for our lives. Bryan Chapell

The reason is, because it’s of more importance to community, that innocence should be protected, than it is, that guilt should be punished. David McCullough

It is the church that must proclaim the law out of Zion Sunday Adelaja

The law works in mysterious ways Kenneth Eade

Every law requires a response Sunday Adelaja

It is when the colors do not match, when the references in the index fail, when there is no decisive precedent, that the serious business of the judge begins Benjamin Cardozo

A government of laws, and not of men. John Adams

One of the most corrosive aspects of the criminal justice system is its toleration of the insanity defense... Legitimate in some few cases, the insanity defense has been rendered farcical through its manipulation by so-called experts. Robert K. Tanenbaum

Justice is the armed defense of innocent liberty. Wolf DeVoon

Today, he’d observed them seize a woman who’d gotten pregnant with an unregistered child. There’d be no chance at lenience. She would be Confined until she gave birth, the child would be placed in the Council’s care, and the mother would be executed. The ship could only support a certain number of lives, and allowing anyone to disrupt the delicate balance would jeopardize the entire race. . Kass Morgan

Law should be a literary profession, ' RGB says, 'and the best legal practioners regard law as an art as well as a craft. Irin Carmon

The highest law in nature is love yourself, and seek your own interests before anything else Bangambiki Habyarimana

The perhaps rather prosaic truth that law is an imperfect yet indispensable vehicle by which both to conserve and transform society Raymond Wacks

The law doesn't require truth, only the appearance of it. Most cases simply rest on a version of it that's acceptable to both sides. You want to know the only truth is? Everybody lies.-- Elwin Stark John Connolly

If our leaders ignore the rule of law, it is certain that they have broken the social contract. The social contract is not a declaration of a lasting war but of a lasting peace who's regulation is charged by the will of the people under the rule of law. I pray the we are wise enough to keep our moral compass. R.A.Delmonico

All natural laws retain the balance contained within the scope of that law, no man made law can do this. It is better to understand the natural laws that govern society then to create man made laws that will not work. R.A.Delmonico

...it is crucial to realize that an once of student affairs administration prevention can stave off a pound of lawyers. Peter F. Lake

One of the immutable laws of being human is that the people who show up are the right people. Anne Lamott