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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"At some point or another, our boundaries run into the boundaries of the exterior reality. Like we run into laws and other things that we don't own or don't have control over."
"It would be an absurdity for jurors to be required to accept the judge's view of the law, against their own opinion, judgment, and conscience."
"A single assembly will never be a steady guardian of the laws, if Machiavel is right, when he says, Men are never good but through necessity: on the contrary, when good and evil are left to their choice, they will not fail to throw every thing into disorder and confusion. Hunger and poverty may make men industrious, but laws only can make them good; for, if men were so of themselves, there would be no occasion for laws; but, as the case is far otherwise, they are absolutely necessary."
"I would define liberty to be a power to do as we would be done by. The definition of liberty to be the power of doing whatever the law permits, meaning the civil laws, does not seem satisfactory."
"[Invading Iraq] is not the best way to make a safer world in which the United States would be a responsible partner, but it also goes against the role of law in the United States."
"Our nation is founded on the principal that observance of the law is the eternal safeguard of liberty and defiance of the law is the surest road to tyranny."
"We must create world-wide law and law enforcement as we outlaw world-wide war and weapon"
"As the magistrate has no power to impose by his laws the use of any rites and ceremonies in any church, so neither has he any power to forbid the use of such rites and ceremonies as are already received, approved, and practised by any church; because if he did so, he would destroy the church itself; the end of whose institution is only to worship God with freedom, after its own manner."
"There are no laws by which we can write Iliads."
"All that makes existence valuable to any one depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people."
"I have not revoked this law, nor will I, for it is everlasting, and those who will enter into my glory must obey the conditions thereof; Even so Amen."
"Have you not observed that there is a lower kind of discretion and regularity, which seldom fails of raising men to the highest station in the court, the church, and the law?"
"Possession, they say, is eleven points of the law."
"Conscience signifies that knowledge which a man hath of his own thoughts and actions; and because, if a man judgeth fairly of his actions by comparing them with the law of God, his mind will approve or condemn him; this knowledge or conscience may be both an accuser and a judge."
"By the laws of God, of nature, of nations, and of your country you are and ought to be as free a people as your brethren in England."
"A maxim in law has more weight in the world than an article of faith."
"Not only does the universe have its own laws, all of them indifferent to the contradictory dreams and desires of humanity, and in the formulation of which we contribute not one iota, apart, that is, from the words by which we clumsily name them, but everything seems to indicate that it uses these laws for aims and objectives that transcend and always will transcend our understanding."
"I believe that the United States has a moral obligation to stand up for those citizens of the world who cannot stand up for themselves, and I am proud to have authored the bill signed into law today that continues to put significant pressure on the brutal Burmese military junta."
"The laws of nature are only as immutable as the minds which promote them. Ignorance of the law is 9/10ths of the law. Just because you aren't paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you."
"Religion is neither a theology nor a theosophy; it is more than that, it is a discipline, a law, a yoke, an indissoluble engagement."
