Law quotes
9.3K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"Adorn thyself with simplicity and with indifference towards the things which lie between virtue and vice. Love mankind. Follow God. The poet says that Law rules all. And it is enough to remember that law rules all."
"For there is but one essential justice which cements society, and one law which establishes this justice. This law is right reason, which is the true rule of all commandments and prohibitions. Whoever neglects this law, whether written or unwritten, is necessarily unjust and wicked."
"You could not have evolved a complex system like a city or an organism - with an enormous number of components - without the emergence of laws that constrain their behavior in order for them to be resilient."
"Men are not governed by justice, but by law or persuasion. When they refuse to be governed by law or persuasion, they have to be governed by force or fraud, or both."
"The Practice I was on for seven years and it was a law show, so I really - a lot of objections and things like that, lots of long, long monologues that David Kelly used to write me, which were great. I was really lucky to have my first show go that long."
"The Lord loves the one that loves the Lord And the law says if you don't give, then you don't get loving Now the Lord helps those that help themselves And the law says whatever you do It comes right back on you"
"I never mean, unless some particular circumstances should compel it, to possess another slave by purchase, it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted, by which slavery in this country may be abolished by law."
"Liberty is indeed little less than a name, where the Government is too feeble to withstand the enterprises of faction, to confine each member of society within the limits prescribed by the law, and to maintain all in the secure and tranquil enjoyme"
"How dangerous it is rashly to adopt the Mosaical institutions [Old Testament teachings of eye for an eye]. Laws might have been proper for a tribe of ardent barbarians wandering through the sands of Arabia which are wholly unfit for an enlightened people of civilized and gentle manners."
"The position we have now reached is this: starting from the State, we try to remedy the failures of all the families, all the nurseries, all the schools, all the workshops, all the secondary institutions that once had some authority of their own. Everything is ultimately brought into the Law Courts. We are trying to stop the leak at the other end."
"A lot of countries break (or go against) the international law."
"If the most important revolutionary part of the George W. Bush Doctrine is that states that harbor terrorists are terrorist states, what do we conclude from that? We conclude exactly what Kissinger was kind enough to say: These doctrines are unilateral. They are not intended as doctrines of international law or doctrines of international affairs. They are doctrines that grant the U.S. the right to use force and violence and to harbor terrorists, but not anyone else."
"I protect my right to be a Catholic by preserving your right to believe as a Jew, a Protestant, or non-believer, or as anything else you choose. We know that the price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that they might some day force theirs on us. This freedom is the fundamental strength of our unique experiment in government. In the complex interplay of forces and considerations that go into the making of our laws and policies, its preservation must be a pervasive and dominant concern."
"Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them?"
"In 1694 a law was passed "that every settler who deserted a town for fear of the Indians should forfeit all his rights therein." But now, at any rate, as I have frequently observed, a man may desert the fertile frontier territories of truth and justice, which are the State's best lands, for fear of far more insignificant foes, without forfeiting any of his civil rights therein. Nay, townships are granted to deserters, and the General Court, as I am sometimes inclined to regard it, is but a deserters' camp itself."
"To be right is more honorable than to be law abiding."
"Why the jailer does not leave open his prison doors,--why the judge does not dismiss his case,--why the preacher does not dismisshis congregation! It is because they do not obey the hint God gives them, nor accept the pardon which he freely offers to all."
"If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only fact, or the description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the particular results at that point."
"There is a law of neutralization of forces, which hinders bodies from sinking beyond a certain depth in the sea; but in the ocean of baseness, the deeper we get, the easier the sinking."
"I devote myself to what I love the most, and for this very reason I hesitate to designate it with lofty words: I do not want to risk believing that it is a sublime compulsion, a law, which I obey: I love what I love the most too much to wish to appear to it as one compelled."
