"One thing I learned a long time ago as a prosecutor is that it's tough to get people to obey a law if there is not penalty for breaking it"
Read quote
16 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 26 of 467)
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"If love wasn't the law of life, life would not have persisted in the midst of death."
Read quote
16 likes
"The more laws that are written, the more criminals are produced."
Read quote
16 likes
"Rent-control laws disproportionately benefit the non-poor because the elite pull strings, work the system and are better connected than the non-poor."
Read quote
16 likes
"Since the narrower or wider community of the peoples of the earth has developed so far that a violation of rights in one place is felt throughout the world, the idea of a cosmopolitan right is not fantastical, high-flown or exaggerated notion. It is a complement to the unwritten code of the civil and international law, necessary for the public rights of mankind in general and thus for the realization of perpetual peace."
Read quote
16 likes
"And thus we rust Life's iron chain Degraded and alone: And some men curse, and some men weep, And some men make no moan: But God's eternal Laws are kind And break the heart of stone"
Read quote
16 likes
"To retain respect for sausages and laws, one must not watch them in the making."
Read quote
16 likes
"The current prohibition laws are forcing drug disputes to be played out with guns in our streets. We need to put a stop to this criminal drug element in our country."
Read quote
16 likes
"Here I am a woman attorney being told I can't practice law in slacks by a judge dressed in drag."
Read quote
16 likes
"Since my logic aims to teach and instruct the understanding, not that it may with the slender tendrils of the mind snatch at and lay hold of abstract notions (as the common logic does), but that it may in very truth dissect nature, and discover the virtues and actions of bodies, with their laws as determined in matter; so that this science flows not merely from the nature of the mind, but also from the nature of things."
Read quote
16 likes
"Only Lawyers and mental defectives are automatically exempt for jury duty."
Read quote
16 likes
"In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man's new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit."
Read quote
16 likes
"The improvement of life was only accomplished to the extent to which it was based on a change of consciousness, that is, to the extent to which the law of violence was replaced in men's consciousness by the law of love."
Read quote
16 likes
"The Laws of Nature are just, but terrible. There is no weak mercy in them. Cause and consequence are inseparable and inevitable. The elements have no forbearance. The fire burns, the water drowns, the air consumes, the earth buries. And perhaps it would be well for our race if the punishment of crimes against the Laws of Man were as inevitable as the punishment of crimes against the Laws of Nature -were Man as unerring in his judgments as Nature."
Read quote
16 likes
"Evolution is the law of policies: Darwin said it, Socrates endorsed it, Cuvier proved it and established it for all time in his paper on The Survival of the Fittest. These are illustrious names, this is a mighty doctrine: nothing can ever remove it from its firm base, nothing dissolve it, but evolution."
Read quote
16 likes
"Evolution is a blind giant who rolls a snowball down a hill. The ball is made of flakes-circumstances. They contribute to the mass without knowing it. They adhere without intention, and without foreseeing what is to result. When they see the result they marvel at the monster ball and wonder how the contriving of it came to be originally thought out and planned. Whereas there was no such planning, there was only a law: the ball once started, all the circumstances that happened to lie in its path would help to build it, in spite of themselves."
Read quote
16 likes
"In truth, laws are always useful to those with possessions and harmful to those who have nothing; from which it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only when all possess something and none has too much."
Read quote
16 likes
"The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them, to the end that it may be a government of laws and not of men."
Read quote
16 likes
"The fundamental law of the militia is, that it be created, directed and commanded by the laws, and ever for the support of the laws."
Read quote
16 likes
"Certain other societies may respect the rule of force--we respect the rule of law."
Read quote
16 likes