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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"People are always trading their excess for somebody else's excess. One country has a lot of aluminum so they trade aluminum for sugar. It's the law of supply and demand."
"Law is nothing else but the best reason of wise men applied for ages to the transactions and business of mankind."
"Let reverence for the laws . . . become the political religion of the nation."
"In law it is good policy to never plead what you need not, lest you oblige yourself to prove what you can not."
"If you wish to be a lawyer, attach no consequence to the place you are in, or the person you are with; but get books, sit down anywhere, and go to reading for yourself. That will make a lawyer of you quicker than any other way."
"No organic law can ever be framed with a provision specifically applicable to every question which may occur in practical administration. .. No foresight can anticipate nor any document of reasonable length contain express provisions for all possible questions."
"I take it that it is best for all to leave each man free to acquire property as fast as he can. Some will get wealthy. I dont believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich; it would do more harm than good."
"If you are resolutely determined to make a lawyer of yourself, the thing is more than half done already."
"I hold, that in contemplation of universal law, and of the Constitution, the Union of these States is perpetual."
"Let no young man choosing the law for a calling for a moment yield to the popular belief -- resolve to be honest at all events; and if in your own judgment you cannot be an honest lawyer, resolve to be honest without being a lawyer."
"The just response to this terrible event [9/11] should be to go immediately to the world community, the United Nations. The rule of international law should be marshaled, but it's probably too late because the United States has never done that; it's always gone it alone."
"Success is the most natural thing in the world. The person who does not succeed has placed himself in opposition to the laws of the Universe."
"Crime is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today, economic, political, social, and moral, conspires to misdirect human energy into wrong channels; so long as most people are out of place doing the things they hate to do, living a life they loathe to live, crime will be inevitable, and all the laws on the statutes can only increase, but never do away with, crime."
"No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be within the law?"
"Never can a new idea move within the law. It matters not whether that idea pertains to political and social changes or to any other domain of human thought and expression - to science, literature, music; in fact, everything that makes for freedom and joy and beauty must refuse to move within the law. How can it be otherwise? The law is stationary, fixed, mechanical, 'a chariot wheel' which grinds all alike without regard to time, place and condition, without ever taking into account cause and effect, without ever going into the complexity of the human soul."
"There's nothing tiny or insignificant. Everything is significant. And everything flows on the same basis of Laws. Whether you are looking at world events or something that's happening in your kitchen drawer, broad and important, or narrow and seemingly insignificant, there's potential for connection or disconnection in either case. And it is only the connection or the disconnection that is of really any importance."
"Fidelity to the law of your own being is an act of high courage flung in the face of life."
"Revolt and terror pay a price. Order and law have a cost."
"Except God no substance can be granted or conceived. .. Everything, I say, is in God, and all things which are made, are made by the laws of the infinite nature of God, and necessarily follows from the necessity of his essence."
"Man can, indeed, act contrarily to the decrees of God, as far as they have been written like laws in the minds of ourselves or the prophets, but against that eternal decree of God, which is written in universal nature, and has regard to the course of nature as a whole, he can do nothing."
