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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"Law Number L: The average regulation has a life span one-fifth as long as a chimpanzee's and one-tenth as long as a human's, but four times as long as the official's who created it."
"Law Number XIV: After the year 2015, there will be no airplane crashes. There will be no takeoffs either, because electronics will occupy 100 percent of every airplane's weight."
"Fury said to a mousethat he met in the houselet us both go to law; I will prosecute youlet there be no denial; come, we must have a trialfor really, this morning, I've nothing to dosuch a trial, dear sir, said the mouse to the curwithout jury or judge would be wasting our breathI'll be judge, I'll be jurysaid cunning old furyI'll try the whole cause and condemn youto death"
"There should be a law that you can't shut down the government - that you don't have that power."
"If there is one set of laws, one Constitution for every citizen, its protections hopefully applied equally to all, then why do the results seem to differ so radically? What do you call that? Look around - you're living in it."
"George Zimmerman is a foot soldier in a rapidly privatizing country. He is a new centurion of 21st-century America. Law enforcement is tied down by the strictures of, well, the law. There is only 'so much they can do' to take care of the 'problem.'"
"I've never killed anybody... but I've definitely thought about it. But that's how we are. That's what happens when you put people together and put them into societies and cultures and have laws and the idea of justice."
"...and for that they were rich,/And robbed the poor; and for that they were strong,/And scourged the weak; and for that they made laws/Which turned the sweat of labor's brow to blood! - /For these their sins the nations cast them out."
"The people should fight for the law as for their city wall."
"The people must fight on behalf of the law as though for the city wall."
"The believer in magic and miracles reflects on how to impose a law on nature--: and, in brief, the religious cult is the outcome of this reflection."
"In the 'in-itself' there is nothing of 'causal connections', of 'necessity', or of 'psychological non-freedom'; there the effect does not follow the cause, there is no rule or 'law'. It is we alone who have devised cause, sequence, for-each-other, relativity, constraint, number, law, freedom, motive, and purpose; and when we project and mix this symbol world into things as if it existed 'in itself', we act once more as we have always acted- mythologically."
"Whoever has overthrown an existing law of custom has always first been accounted a bad man: but when, as did happen, the law could not afterwards be reinstated and this fact was accepted, the predicate gradually changed; - history treats almost exclusively of these bad men who subsequently became good men!"
"To be moral, correct, and virtuous is to be obedient to an old established law and custom."
"That little hypocrites and half-crazed people dare to imagine that on their account the laws of nature are constantly broken; such an enhancement of every kind of selfishness to infinity, to impudence, cannot be branded with sufficient contempt. And yet Christianity owes its triumph to this pitiable flattery of personal vanity."
"The stronger becomes master of the weaker, in so far as the latter cannot assert its degree of independence here there is no mercy, no forbearance, even less a respect for "laws."
"There is such a thing as a hatred of lies and dissimulation, which is the outcome of a delicate sense of humor; there is also the selfsame hatred but as the result of cowardice, in so far as falsehood is forbidden by Divine law. Too cowardly to lie."
"- What is a Socialist? - That's when all are equal and all have property in common, there are no marriages, and everyone has any religion and laws he likes best. You are not old enough to understand that yet."
"While I have made errors that I deeply regret, I have never, ever done so with the intent of subverting the law or of benefiting myself."
"The country [Afghanistan] faces enormous problems. There is a violent insurgency hampering the rule of law and developmental efforts."
