"Freedom is the silence of the law."
Read quote
3 likes
Law quotes
Law
9.3K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Topics related to Law
Browse quotes that often appear alongside law — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Law quotes (page 132 of 467)
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"Arizona's law makes what is already a federal offense - being in the country illegally - a state offense. Some critics seem not to understand Arizona's right to assert concurrent jurisdiction."
Read quote
3 likes
"A properly functioning free market system does not spring spontaneously from society's soil as crabgrass springs from suburban lawns. Rather, it is a complex creation of laws and mores... Capitalism is a government program."
Read quote
3 likes
"A large number of suspects, both men and women, escaped martial law for lack of any shred of evidence against them on which a court-martial could convict. So they began setting them free in groups, according to their birth-place. But half-way, the car-load would be emptied into a ditch."
Read quote
3 likes
"If Moses is our lawgiver [Old Testament prophet given laws by God] at this time let us obey him, not in part only, but wholly, and put every Sabbath breaker, blasphemer, and adulterer to death."
Read quote
3 likes
"We do not need to get good laws to restrain bad people. We need to get good people to restrain us from bad laws."
Read quote
3 likes
"Science is the study of the admitted laws of existence, which cannot prove a universal negative about whether those laws could ever be suspended by something admittedly above them. It is as if we were to say that a lawyer was so deeply learned in the American Constitution that he knew there could never be a revolution in America."
Read quote
3 likes
"When it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity."
Read quote
3 likes
"The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them."
Read quote
3 likes
"Any one of the strange laws we suffer is a compromise between a fad and a vested interest."
Read quote
3 likes
"What is the good of telling a community that it has every liberty except the liberty to make laws? The liberty to make laws is what constitutes a free people."
Read quote
3 likes
"All the controversialists who have become conscious of the real issue are already saying of our ideal exactly what used to be said of the Socialists' ideal. They are saying that private property is too ideal not to be impossible. They are saying that private enterprise is too good to be true. They are saying that the idea of ordinary men owning ordinary possessions is against the laws of political economy and requires an alteration in human nature."
Read quote
3 likes
"You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes."
Read quote
3 likes
"You!" he cried. "You never hated because you never lived. I know what you are all of you, from first to last--you are the people in power! You are the police--the great, fat smiling men in blue and buttons! You are the Law, and you have never been broken. But is there a free soul alive that does not long to break you, only because you have never been broken?"
Read quote
3 likes
"There is a law written in the darkest of the Books of Life, and it is this: If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time."
Read quote
3 likes
"American laws don't work, but at least the laws of physics might work."
Read quote
3 likes
"It never occurred to any Enlightenment figure in the eighteenth century that law was not preferable to man."
Read quote
3 likes
"The period of Prohibition - called the noble experiment - brought on the greatest breakdown of law and order the United States has known until today. I think there is a lesson here. Do not regulate the private morals of people. Do not tell them what they can take or not take. Because if you do, they will become angry and antisocial and they will get what they want from criminals who are able to work in perfect freedom because they have paid off the police."
Read quote
3 likes
"The founder brought the laws from the lawgiver; the faithful are meant to announce the laws to the lawgiver."
Read quote
3 likes
"Everyone strives to attain the Law,' answers the man, 'how does it come about, then, that in all these years no one has come seeking admittance but me?' The doorkeeper perceives that the man is nearing his end and his hearing is failing, so he bellows in his ear: 'No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since this door was intended for you. I am now going to shut it."
Read quote
3 likes