quotations about law
Laws are confusing documents. They get in the way of justice.
PAOLO BACIGALUPI
The Windup Girl
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
letter to Charles James Fox, Oct. 8, 1777
Of all injustice that is the greatest which goes under the name of law.
L'ESTRANGE
attributed, Day's Collacon
In truth, laws are always useful to those with possessions and harmful to those who have nothing; from which it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only when all possess something and none has too much.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU
The Social Contract, Or Principles of Political Right
Every law is an evil, for every law is an infraction of liberty.
JEREMY BENTHAM
Principles of Legislation
Laws or ordinances unobserved, or partially attended to, had better never have been made.
GEORGE WASHINGTON
letter to James Madison, Mar. 31, 1787
Where there are laws, innocence need not tremble.
VITTORIO ALFIERI
Virginia
The Law is hard, but it is the Law.
CASSANDRA CLARE
City of Glass
Laws ought to be fashioned unto the manners and conditions of the people whom they are meant to benefit, and not imposed upon them according to the simple rule of right.
EDMUND SPENSER
The Works of Mr. Edmund Spenser
The Law ... is perfection of reason.
SIR EDWARD COKE
Institutes: Commentary upon Littleton
No one will ever comprehend the arrested civilizations unless he sees the strict dilemma of early society. Either men had no law at all, and lived in confused tribes, hardly hanging together, or they had to obtain a fixed law by processes of incredible difficulty. Those who surmounted that difficulty soon destroyed all those that lay in their way who did not.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics
No laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken sober.
SAMUEL SMILES
Self-Help
Reason is the life of the law, nay the common law is nothing else but reason.
SIR EDWARD COKE
Institutes: Commentary upon Littleton
Societies start moving menacingly on the lines of Whataboutery when law is not applied equally and justly to all.
RAJNI SHALEEN CHOPRA
"What's in the slogan!", Rising Kashmir, March 25, 2016
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
Life Thoughts
We may brave human laws, but we cannot resist natural ones.
JULES VERNE
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Law ... is the clear, translucent stream of justice, flowing freely and smoothly between the banks of wisdom and truth, purified by mercy and equity. As found upon our statue books, this highway of justice, like some of our rivers, is interrupted in its free course, by individual dams, sand bars, snags, and flood wood; often changing the channel, and causing many a shipwreck.
LEVI CARROLL JUDSON
The Moral Probe: or, One Hundred and Two Common Sense Essays on the Nature of Men and Things
No man is above the law, and no man is below it.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
Message of the President of the United States Communicated to the Two Houses of Congress at the Beginning of the Second Session of the Fifty-eighth Congress
For in a government of laws and not of men, no man, however prominent or powerful, and no mob however unruly or boisterous, is entitled to defy a court of law. If this country should ever reach the point where any man or group of men by force or threat of force could long defy the commands of our court and our Constitution, then no law would stand free from doubt, no judge would be sure of his writ, and no citizen would be safe from his neighbors.
JOHN F. KENNEDY
radio and television report to the nation on the situation at the University of Mississippi, Sep. 30, 1962
[The Utopians] have no lawyers among them, for they consider them as a sort of people whose profession it is to disguise matters and to wrest the laws, and, therefore, they think it is much better that every man should plead his own cause, and trust it to the judge, as in other places the client trusts it to a counsellor; by this means they both cut off many delays and find out truth more certainly; for after the parties have laid open the merits of the cause, without those artifices which lawyers are apt to suggest, the judge examines the whole matter, and supports the simplicity of such well-meaning persons, whom otherwise crafty men would be sure to run down; and thus they avoid those evils which appear very remarkably among all those nations that labour under a vast load of laws.
SIR THOMAS MORE
Utopia