Law quotes
9.3K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"Democracy is made up of three elements. One is whether the laws support pluralistic principles. The second is whether the people take advantage of these laws. The third element is whether the peoples' wallets are thick enough to benefit from this democracy."
"Is it against the law for me to know it?"
"I don't know what I would do without Whitelaw. Everyone should have a Willy."
"At one end of the spectrum are the terrorist gangs within our borders, and the terrorist states which finance and arm them. At the other are the hard left operating inside our system, conspiring to use union power and the apparatus of local government to break, defy and subvert the law."
"It is recorded how towards the end of the eighteenth century a Muslim visitor to England was taken to see the House of Commons at work. He later wrote of his astonishment at finding the that the British Parliament actually made laws and fixed punishments for their infraction - because unlike Muslims the English had not accepted a divine law revealed from heaven and therefore had to resort to such unsatisfactory expedients. Muslims still understand the expression 'the rule of law' very differently than do most Westerners."
"I'm standing up for the right of self-determination. I'm standing up for our territory. I'm standing up for our people. I'm standing up for international law. I'm standing up for all those territories - those small territories and peoples the world over - who, if someone doesn't stand up and say to an invader 'enough, stop', would be at risk."
"any fair-minded person will agree that humanity hasn't the faintest inkling, at this time, of the powers and laws that will, sometime, be known and used."
"The law is equal before all of us; but we are not all equal before the law. Virtually there is one law for the rich and another for the poor, one law for the cunning and another for the simple, one law for the forceful and another for the feeble, one law for the ignorant and another for the learned, one law for the brave and another for the timid, and within family limits one law for the parent and no law at all for the child."
"The criminal law is no use to decent people."
"Whenever you wish to do anything against the law, Cicely, always consult a good solicitor first."
"Not until he acquires European manners does the American anarchist become the gentleman who assures you that people cannot be mademoral by Act of Parliament (the truth being that it is only by Acts of Parliament that men in large communities can be made moral, even when they want to)."
"Unless the law of marriage were first made human, it could never become divine."
"He said that private practice in medicine ought to be put down by law. When I asked him why, he said that private doctors were ignorant licensed murders."
"The law and medicine should be very serious professions to undertake, should they not? People's lives and fortunes depend on them."
"Though I am not endowed with an ear to seize those earthly harmonies, which to some devout souls have seemed, as it were, the broken echoes of the heavenly choir--I apprehend that there is a law in music, disobedience whereunto would bring us in our singing to the level of shrieking maniacs or howling beasts."
"The higher life begins for us ... when we renounce our own will to bow before a Divine law."
"When one wanted one's interests looking after whatever the cost, it was not so well for a lawyer to be over honest, else he might not be up to other people's tricks."
"That is one of the Law's purposes, of course: to test the qualities of those who choose to employ it."
"Law is the ultimate science."
"Justice required resort to law and that could be a fickle mistress, subject always to the whims and prejudices of those who administered the laws."
