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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"The dogma of the mystic offices of Christ being dropped, and he standing on his genius as a moral teacher, 'tis impossible to maintain the old emphasis of his personality; and it recedes, as all persons must, before the sublimity of the moral laws."
"Let us replace sentimentalism by realism and dare to uncover those simple and terrible laws which, be they seen or unseen, pervade and govern."
"The highest virtue is always against the law."
"The law of nature is alternation for evermore. Each electrical state superinduces the opposite. The soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society."
"When we count on chance in lieu of law and labor, we weaken our healthy attitudes toward work, our fellow men and our God."
"The laws of the colors are unutterably beautiful, just because they are not accidental."
"This is where I think the psychedelics come in because they are anticipations of the future. They seem to channel information that is not strictly governed by the laws of normal causality. So that there really is a prophetic dimension, a glimpse of the potential of the far centuries of the future through these compounds."
"He who would govern his actions by the laws of virtue must regulate his thoughts by those of reason."
"Laws teach us to know when we commit injury and when we suffer it."
"For gold the hireling judge distorts the laws."
"Providence has fixed the limits of human enjoyment by immovable boundaries, and has set different gratifications at such a distance from each other, that no art or power can bring them together. This great law it is the business of every rational being to understand, that life may not pass away in an attempt to make contradictions consistent, to combine opposite qualities, and to unite things which the nature of their being must always keep asunder."
"Those who suppress freedom always do so in the name of law and order." - John V. Lindsay "No government power can be abused long. Mankind will not bear it."
"So willing is every man to flatter himself, that the difference between approving laws, and obeying them, is frequently forgotten; he that acknowledges the obligations of morality and pleases his vanity with enforcing them to others, concludes himself zealous in the cause of virtue."
"All violation of established practice implies in its own nature a rejection of the common opinion, a defiance of common censure, and an appeal from general laws to private judgment: he, therefore, who differs form others without apparent advantage, ought not to be angry if his arrogance is punished with ridicule; if those whose example he superciliously overlooks, point him out to derision, and hoot him back again into the common road."
"Lawyers know life practically. A bookish man should always have them to converse with."
"There ambush here relentless ruffians lay, And here the fell attorney prowls for prey."
"Sir, it is wrong to stir up law-suits; but when once it is certain that a law-suit is to go on, there is nothing wrong in a lawyer's endeavouring that he shall have the benefit, rather than another."
"[P]erfect freedom consists in obeying the dictates of right reason, and submitting to natural law. When a man goes beyond or contrary to the law of nature and reason, he . . . introduces confusion and disorder into society . . . [thus] where licentiousness begins, liberty ends."
"The main thing I say on war is that we need to obey the law and formally declare war."
"I say the phone records of law abiding citizens are none of their damn business!"
