Law quotes
9.3K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside law — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"What, then, is the true Gospel of consistency? Change. Who is the really consistent man? The man who changes. Since change is the law of his being, he cannot be consistent if he stick in a rut."
"People must help one another; it is nature's law."
"What, then, is the government? An intermediary body established between the subjects and the sovereign for their mutual communication, and charged with the execution of the laws and the maintenance of freedom, civil as well as political."
"It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished. But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, "whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection," and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever."
"A lawyer once told a jury that the person his client stood accused of having killed was about to walk through the courtroom door. When the jurors looked startled, the lawyer asserted that if those jurors had wondered, even for one second that the victim might appear, that belief constituted enough reasonable doubt for them to find his client innocent."
"One hundred and fifty years ago the vacant lands of the West were opened to private use. One hundred years ago the Congress passed the Homestead Act, probably the single greatest stimulus to national development ever enacted. Under the impetus of that Act and other laws, more than 1.1 billion acres of the original public main have been transferred to private and non-federal public ownership. The 768 million acres remaining in federal ownership are a valuable national asset."
"And because it may be too great a temptation to human frailty, apt to grasp at power, for the same persons, who have the power of making laws, to have also in their hands the power to execute them, whereby they may exempt themselves from obedience to the laws they make, and suit the law, both in its making, and execution, to their own private advantage."
"For a man's property is not at all secure, though there be good and equitable laws to set the bounds of it, between him and his fellow subjects, if he who commands those subjects, have power to take from any private man, what part he pleases of his property, and use and dispose of it as he thinks good."
"It is not our job to apply laws that have not yet been written."
"There is no peace and no rest in the development of material interests. They have their law, and their justice. But it is founded on expediency, and is inhuman; it is without rectitude, without the continuity and the force that can be found only in a moral principle."
"I maintain that the existing corn laws are bad, because they have given a monopoly of food to the landed interest over every other class and over every other interest in the kingdom."
"The law never tells you to pray."
"Maternity is a glorious thing, since all mankind has been conceived, born, and nourished of women. All human laws should encourage the multiplication of families."
"A unjust law, is no law at all."
"It would be better to have no laws at all, than to have too many."
"I don't break the law* made for crooks, when I take away my own property - thus I am not obliged to conform to the law made for murderers when I deprive myself of my own life."
"Ah! how annoying that the law doesn't allow a woman to change husbands just as one does shirts."
"Let me tell you what justice is. Justice is the law. And that man's feeble attempt to lay down the principles of deceny."
"Nature knows nothing but solid bodies; your science deals only with combinations of surfaces. And so nature constantly gives the lie to all your laws; can you name one to which no fact makes an exception?"
"Slavery was, in a very real sense, the first international human rights issue to come to the fore. It led to the adoption of the first human rights laws and to the creation of the first human rights non-governmenta l organization. And yet despite the efforts of the international community to combat this abhorrent practice, it is still widely prevalent in all its insidious forms, old and new."
