Laws - Quotes

A law is valuable, not because it is a law, but because there is right in it. - Henry Ward Beecher

A man with a club is a law-maker. - Jack London

A nation that will not enforce its laws has no claim to the respect and allegiance of its people. - Ambrose Bierce

Accursed be the city where the laws would stifle nature's! - Lord Bryon

Almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics. - Robert A Heinlein

An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law. - Martin Luther King Jr.

Do things that make you happy within the confines of the legal system. - Ellen DeGeneres

Even when laws have been written down, they ought not always to remain unaltered. - Aristotle

Every land has its own law. - J. Carmichael

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. - Marcus Tullius Cicero

Give me the judgment of balanced minds in preference to laws every time. Codes and manuals create patterned behaviour. All patterned behaviour tends to go unquestioned, gathering destructive momentum. - Frank Herbert

Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws. - Plato

He who dethrones the idea of law, bids chaos welcome in its stead. - Horace Mann

I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution. - Ulysses S. Grant

If a man sets out to study all the laws, he will have no time left to transgress them. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable. - Louis D. Brandeis

If you must break the law, do it to seize power: in all other cases observe it. - Julius Caesar

Ignorance of the law excuses no man; not that all men know the law, but because ‘tis an excuse every man will plead, and no man can tell how to confute him. - John Selden

Ignorance of the law is no good excuse, where every man is bound to take notice of the laws to which he is subject. - Thomas Hobbes

In all governments, there must of necessity be both the law and the sword; laws without arms would give us not liberty, but licentiousness; and arms without laws, would produce not subjection, but slavery. The law, therefore, should be unto the sword what the handle is to the hatchet; it should direct the stroke and temper the force. - Charles Caleb Colton

In civil jurisprudence it too often happens that there is so much law, that there is no room for justice, and that the claimant expires of wrong in the midst of right, as mariners die of thirst in the midst of water. - Charles Colton 

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. - Niccolo Machiavelli

It is wrong to consider that courts are established for the benefit of the people. Those who want to perpetuate their power do so through the courts. If people were to settle their own quarrels, a third party would not be able to exercise any authority over them. Truly, men were less unmanly when they settled their disputes either by fighting or by asking their relatives to decide for them. They became more unmanly and cowardly when they resorted to the courts of law. It was certainly a sign of savagery when they settled their disputes by fighting. Is it any less so, if I ask a third party to decide between you and me? Surely, the decision of a third party is not always right. The parties alone know who is right. We, in our simplicity and ignorance, imagine that a stranger, by taking our money, gives us justice. - Mahatma Gandhi

It seems to be a law of nature, inflexible and inexorable, that those who will not risk cannot win. - John Paul Jones

It usually takes a hundred years to make a law, and then, after it has done its work, it usually takes a hundred years to get rid of it. - Henry Ward Beecher

Just because something is a law doesn’t make it right. - Unknown

Law has been called a bottomless pit, not so much because of its depth, as that its windings are so obscure nobody can see the end. - G. P. Morris

Law in origin was merely a codification of the power of dominant groups, and did not aim at anything that to a modern man would appear to be justice. - Bertrand Russell

Law intends indeed to do service to human life, but it is not able when men do not choose to accept her services; for it is only in those who are obedient to her that she displays her special virtue. - Epictetus

Law is a bunch of words written on paper by people who are generally considered to be liars and thieves. So let’s try to figure out what’s right rather than what’s legal. - Joe Rogan

Law is an imperfect profession in which success can rarely be achieved without some sacrifice of principle. Thus, all practicing lawyers – and most others in the profession – will necessarily be imperfect, especially in the eyes of young idealists. There is no perfect justice, just as there is no absolute in ethics. But there is perfect injustice, and we know it when we see it. - Alan Dershowitz

Law is order, and good law is good order. - Aristotle

Law is the rudder of the ship of state. - Austin O’Malley

Law is the supreme power in the state, through its legislature, commanding what is right, and condemning what is wrong. - Calvin Townsend

Law without justice is a wound without a cure. - William Scott Downey

Laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man present his views without penalty there must be spirit of tolerance in the entire population. - Albert Einstein

Laws and institutions are constantly tending to gravitate. Like clocks, they must be occasionally cleansed, and wound up, and set to true time. - Henry Ward Beecher

Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour … If at my convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? - Charlotte Brontë

Laws are confusing documents. They get in the way of justice. - Paolo Bacigalupi

Laws are generally found to be nets of such a texture as the little creep through, the great break through, and the middle size are alone entangled in. - William Shenstone

Laws are generally not understood by three sorts of persons, namely, by those who make them, by those who execute them, and by those who suffer if they break them. - George Savile

Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through. - Jonathan Swift

Laws are not masters but servants, and he rules them who obeys them. - Henry Ward Beecher

Laws are only words, words written on paper, words that change on society’s whim and are interpreted differently daily by politicians, lawyers, judges, and policemen. Anyone who believes that all laws should always be obeyed would have made a fine slave catcher. Anyone who believes that all laws are applied equally, despite race, religion, or economic status, is a fool. - John J. Miller

Laws are subordinate to custom. - Titus Maccius Plautus

Laws catch flies but let hornets go free. - Scottish Proverb

Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law. - Oliver Goldsmith

Laws like to cobwebs catch small flies, great ones break thro' before your eyes. - Benjamin Franklin

Laws or ordinances unobserved, or partially attended to, had better never have been made. - George Washington

Lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law is not punished. - Jeremy Bentham

Nature’s laws affirm instead of prohibit. If you violate her laws you are your own prosecuting attorney, judge, jury, and hangman. - Luther Burbank

No laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken sober. - Samuel Smiles

No man is above the law, and no man is below it. - Theodore Roosevelt

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. - Abraham Lincoln

Nobody has a more sacred obligation to obey the law than those who make the law. - Jean Anouilh

One of the advantages of having laws is the pleasure one may take in breaking them. - Iain M. Banks

People crushed by law, have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws; and those who have much to hope and nothing to lose, will always be dangerous. - Edmund Burke

Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual. - Thomas Jefferson

So diverse and adverse are the decisions of different high courts, and of the same high court, that in examining cases, as precedents by which to try a suit, the lawyer encounters a perpetual change of cloud and sunshine, and occasionally a real thunder storm, succeeded by a burning sun. What was law at one time, is not law now – what is law in one place, is not in another – locality, individuality, prejudice, and perpetual change, characterize the decisions of judges learned in the law. - Levi Carroll Judson

The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly. - Abraham Lincoln

The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings, capable of laws, where there is no law there is no freedom. - John Locke

The final test of civilization of a people is the respect they have for law. - Lewis F. Korns

The first essential of civilization is law. Anarchy is simply the handmaiden and forerunner of tyranny and despotism. Law and order enforced with justice and by strength lie at the foundations of civilization. Law must be based upon justice, else it cannot stand, and it must be enforced with resolute firmness, because weakness in enforcing it means in the end that there is no justice and no law, nothing but the rule of disorderly and unscrupulous strength. Without the habit of orderly obedience to the law, without the stern enforcement of the laws at the expense of those who defiantly resist them, there can be no possible progress, moral or material, in civilization. - Theodore Roosevelt

The law is more easily understood by few than many words. For all words are subject to ambiguity, and therefore multiplication of words in the body of the law is multiplication of ambiguity. Besides, it seems to imply (by too much diligence) that whosoever can evade the words is without the compass of the law. - Thomas Hobbes

The law is the public conscience. - Thomas Hobbes

The natural law is the creator’s law, it is a gift. So, humans must make themselves available to this law in order to know who they are. Since the natural law is a law of healthy; respect of the latter will make Earth balanced, and no more will we hear about global warming, pollution, deforestation … - Benin

The precepts of the law may be comprehended under these three points: to live honestly, to hurt no man wilfully, and to render every man his due carefully. - Aristotle

The strictest law sometimes becomes the severest injustice. - Benjamin Franklin

There is a written and an unwritten law. The one by which we regulate our constitutions in our cities is the written law; that which arises from custom is the unwritten law. - Diogenes Laertius 

The trouble with the laws these days is that criminals know their rights better than their wrongs. - Unknown

There are times, too, when the law doesn't give a damn who gets caught beneath its wheels. - Susanne Alleyn

There is no intrinsic virtue to law and order unless "law" is equated with justice and "order" with the discipline of a people satisfied that justice has been done. - Aung San Suu Kyi

We cannot expect people to have respect for law and order until we teach respect to those we have entrusted to enforce those laws. - Hunter S. Thompson

We cannot live in peace without Law. And though law cannot be perfect, it may be just if it is written in ignorance of the identity of the claimants and applied equally to all. Then it is a possession not only of the claimants but of the society, which may now base its actions upon a reasonable assumption of the law’s treatment. - David Mamet

When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw. - Nelson Mandela

When each citizen submits himself to the authority of law he does not thereby decrease his independence or freedom, but rather increases it. By recognizing that he is a part of a larger body which is banded together for a common purpose, he becomes more than an individual, he rises to a new dignity of citizenship. Instead of finding himself restricted and confined by rendering obedience to public law, he finds himself protected and defended and in the exercise of increased and increasing rights. - Calvin Coolidge

When I hear any man talk of an unalterable law, the only effect it produces upon me is to convince me that he is an unalterable fool. - Sydney Smith

When men are pure, laws are useless; when men are corrupt, laws are broken. - Benjamin Disraeli

Where law ends, tyranny begins. - William Pitt

Without law men are beasts. - Maxwell Anderson

Written laws are formulas in which we endeavor to express as concisely as possible that which, under such or such determined circumstances, natural justice demands. - Victor Cousin