Law quotes
9.3K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside law — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"And wherever men are fighting against barbarism, tyranny, and massacre, for freedom, law, and honour, let them remember that the fame of their deeds, even though they themselves be exterminated, may perhaps be celebrated as long as the world rolls round."
"The jury system has come to stand for all we mean by English justice. The scrutiny of 12 honest jurors provides defendants and plaintiffs alike a safeguard from arbitrary perversion of the law."
"There is not one single social or economic principle or concept in the philosophy of the Russian Bolshevik which has not been realized, carried into action, and enshrined in immutable laws a million years ago by the white ant."
"I am told the settlement of $5 million I am being paid is the largest amount ever paid under the New York right to privacy law"
"The profession I chose was politics; the profession I entered was law. I entered the one because I thought it would lead to the other."
"My hope is ... that we may recover ... something of a renewal of that vision of the law with which men may be supposed to have started out with in the old days of the oracles, who communed with the intimations of divinity."
"The law that will work is merely the summing up in legislative form of the moral judgment that the community has already reached."
"Bagehot did what so many thousand of young graduates before him had done,--he studied for the bar; and then, having prepared himself to practise law, followed another large body of young men in deciding to abandon it."
"The cliché organizes life; it expropriates people's identity; it becomes ruler, defense lawyer, judge, and the law."
"The law is only one of several imperfect and more or less external ways of defending what is better in life against what is worse. By itself, the law can never create anything better. Establishing respect for the law does not automatically ensure a better life for that, after all, is a job for people and not for laws and institutions."
"Would you really like to live in a society where you have no responsibility and no freedom, no choice, only the false option of obedience to the law, or disobedience followed by punishment? Would you really want to go live in a prison?"
"By such literalism, fundamentalism, religions betrayed the best intentions of their founders. Reducing thought to formula, replacing choice by obedience, these preachers turned the living word into dead law."
"The law of evolution is that the strongest survives."
"Science fiction - and the correct shortcut is 'sf' - uses actual scientific facts or theories for the source ideas or framework of the story. It has some scientific content, however speculative. If it breaks a law of physics, it knows it's doing so and follows up the consequences. If it invents a society of aliens, it does so with some respect for and knowledge of the social sciences and what you might call social probabilities. And some of it is literarily self-aware enough to treat its metaphors as metaphors."
"Upon the glazen shelves kept watch Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith The army of unalterable law."
"The customs of God's people and the institutions of our ancestors are to be considered as laws. And those who throw contempt on the customs of the Church ought to be punished as those who disobey the law of God."
"Slavery is not penal in character and planned by that law which commands the preservation of the natural order and forbids disturbance."
"Free curiosity has greater power to stimulate learning than rigorous coercion. Nevertheless, the free ranging flux of curiosity is channeled by discipline under Your Law."
"We will ensure that nobody is above the law and demand an end to the instability and armed chaos."
"Joy is there everywhere; it is superfluous, unnecessary; nay, it very often contradicts the most peremptory behests of necessity. It exists to show that the bonds of law can only be explained by love; they are like body and soul. Joy is the realisation of the truth of oneness, the oneness of our soul with the world and of the world-soul with the supreme lover."
