"Judges must beware of hard constructions and strained inferences, for there is no worse torture than that of laws."
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Law quotes
Law
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Law quotes (page 77 of 467)
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"For as good habits of the people require good laws to support them, so laws, to be observed, need good habits on the part of the people."
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"It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope."
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"For as laws are necessary that good manners be preserved, so there is need of good manners that law may be maintained."
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"The stream of tendency in which all things seek to fulfill the law of their being."
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"God overrules all mutinous accidents, brings them under His laws of fate, and makes them all serviceable to His purpose."
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"Laws are inoperative in war"
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"We are bound by the law, so that we may be free."
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"Who doesn't know that the first law of history is not to dare to say anything false, and the second is not to refrain from saying anything true?"
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"Liberty consists in the power of doing that which is permitted by the law."
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"For as the law is set over the magistrate, even so are the magistrates set over the people. And therefore, it may be truly said, "that the magistrate is a speaking law, and the law is a silent magistrate."
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"The best interpreter of the law is custom."
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"The gardener plants trees, not one berry of which he will ever see: and shall not a public man plant laws, institutions, government, in short, under the same conditions?"
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"Every time we sign a treaty with another country, the treaty (should) include prisoner transfer provisions.... Under these provisions, the country in which the crimes were committed could demand that the convicts' country of origin incarcerate the prisoners for the terms to which they were sentenced.... Foreign felons in U.S. prisons are exacerbating out budget and law enforcement problems.... We will never get countries to take back their prisoners unless we have some leverage. NAFTA gives us that opportunity."
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"Freedom under the law must never be taken for granted."
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"Crime is only the retail department of what, in wholesale, we call penal law."
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"Our laws make law impossible; our liberties destroy all freedom; our property is organized robbery; our morality an impudent hypocrisy; our wisdom is administered by inexperienced or mal-experienced dupes; our power wielded by cowards and weaklings; and our honour false in all its points. I am an enemy of the existing order for good reasons"
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"Laws, religions, creeds, and systems of ethics, instead of making society better than its best unit, make it worse than its average unit, because they are never up to date."
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"Government want to tell you things you can't say because they're against the law, or you can't say this because it's against a regulation, or here's something you can't say because its a... secret; "You can't tell him that because he's not cleared to know that." Government wants to control information and control language because that's the way you control thought, and basically that's the game they're in."
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"And although I broke a lot of laws as a teenager, I straightened out immediately upon turning eighteen, when I realized the state had a legal right to execute me."
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