Law quotes
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside law — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"We still leave unblotted in the leaves of our statute book, for the reverence and admiration of successive ages, the just and wholesome law which declares that the sturdy felon shall be fed and clothed, and that the penniless debtor shall be left to die of starvation and nakedness. This is no fiction."
"Walker's Law: There are few things made harder in this world by having money."
"You just got to be really logical when you're a comedian - to a fault. Like a lawyer's got to believe in the law."
"Dude, I didn't say Jude Law can't act. I didn't say Jude Law was in bad movies. I just said he's in every movie."
"I see as white people finding loopholes in the slavery laws."
"The failure of love, that's what all laws are really."
"Indiana's governor is coming under fire for a new law that some people feel is anti-gay. The governor now says he is not anti-gay. Then immediately afterwards he said, 'April Fools.' It wasn't his best joke."
"If it is life that you feel you are missing I can tell you where to find it. In the law courts, in business, in government. There is nothing occurring in the streets. Nothing but a dumbshow composed of the helpless and the impotent."
"So much has to do with going beyond treating black people as cosmetic and symbolic items, as opposed to genuine personalities and human beings. And that is a deep moral and spiritual issue, which can of course be backed up by Civil Rights Commissions which enforce the laws against any form of discrimination."
"But it is recognized that punishment for the abuse of the liberty accorded to the press is essential to the protection of the public, and that the common law rules that subject the libeler to responsibility for the public offense, as well as for the private injury, are not abolished by the protection extended in our constitutions. The law of criminal libel rests upon that secure foundation. There is also the conceded authority of courts to punish for contempt when publications directly tend to prevent the proper discharge of judicial functions."
"America... where law and custom alike are based upon the dreams of spinsters..."
"I cannot favour laws such as that of Idaho, which allows sterilization of 'mental defectives, epileptics, habitual criminals, moral degenerates, and sex perverts.' The last two categories here are very vague . . . The law of Idaho would have justified the sterilization of Socrates, Plato, Julius Caesar, and St. Paul."
"It seems clear to me that marriage ought to be constituted by children, and relations not involving children ought to be ignored by the law and treated as indifferent by public opinion. It is only through children that relations cease to be a purely private matter."
"If a law were passed giving six months to every writer of a first book, only the good ones would do it."
"Understanding human nature must be the basis of any real improvement in human life. Science has done wonders in mastering the laws of the physical world, but our own nature is much less understood, as yet, than the nature of stars and electrons. When science learns to understand human nature, it will be able to bring a happiness into our lives which machines and the physical sciences have failed to create."
"My job is to persuade people to toe the line and play within the laws of the game."
"Marijuana grows naturally...Don't you think making nature against the law seems a bit, I don't know, unnatural?"
"Necessity, that great refuge and excuse for human frailty, breaks through all law; and he is not to be accounted in fault whose crime is not the effect of choice, but force."
"Who dispenses reputation? Who makes us respect and revere persons, works, laws, the great? Who but this faculty of imagination? All the riches of the earth are inadequate without its approval."
"Law was once introduced without reason, and has become reasonable."
