Quotes About Law

If you want to change a law, you have to pass a law. Presidents don't write laws. Congress writes laws.

The Twist was a guided missile launched from the ghetto into the heart of suburbia. The Twist succeeded, as politics, religion and law could never do, in writing in the heart and soul what the Supreme Court could only write on the books.

The law says one thing, and custom another," replied Mr. Winter. "What the assemblies legislate and what happens on the back roads of small towns are not always in agreement. Put another way, history takes a long time to happen.

Still, there is no law that says all decent things must be permanent. Perhaps family itself, like beauty, is temporary, and no discredit need attach to beauty, is temporary, and no discredit need attach to impermanence.

Every time you break the law you pay, and every time you obey the law you pay." Upholders, Questioners, Obligers, and Rebels, we all must grapple with the consequences of our Tendency—with its strengths and its weaknesses, its foibles and its frustrations.

In an interview in the Paris Review, novelist and Rebel John Gardner made an observation that I've never forgotten: "Every time you break the law you pay, and every time you obey the law you pay.

My ambition, however, was also a factor in leaving the law. I'd become convinced that passion was a critical factor in professional success... I could see that in my co-clerks at the Supreme Court: they read law journals for fun, they talked about cases during their lunch hours, they felt energized by their efforts. I didn't.

Not a lawyer but carries within him the debris of a poet.

Killing is decreed by law but nature loves eternal youth. Whatever she does, however unconscious and unfeeling the act, she seems to cry out: 'Quick! Quick! Quick!' And the more she destroys, the more she is renewed.

il ne faut chercher que la vérité, sans s'occuper de la morale enseignée, orthodoxe et officielle ; de la morale, cette prétendue loi naturelle, indéfiniment variable, facultative, cette chose dosée différemment pour chaque pays, appréciée de façon nouvelle par chaque expert, prêtre ou législateur, et sans cesse modifiée par tout le monde.

The heart has its own laws... and the truth is... the truth is that you are the law of mine.

His life, like every other life, could be graphed: an ascent that rises to a peak, pauses at a particular node, and then descends. Only the gradient changes in any particular case: this child's was steeper than most, his descent swifter. We all ripen. We are all bound by the same ineluctable law, the same mathematical certainty.

A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.

Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.

Equality before the law is probably forever unattainable. It is a noble ideal, but it can never be realized, for what men value in this world is not rights but privileges.

The effort to put down Christian Science by law is one of the craziest enterprises upon which medical men waste their energies. It is based upon a superstition even sillier than that behind Christian Science itself: to wit, the superstition that, when an evil shows itself, all that is needed to dispose of it is to pass a law against it.

In the long run, nearly all of them must succeed, for the mob is eternally virtuous, and the only thing necessary to get it in favor of some new and super-oppressive law is to convince it that that law will be distasteful to the minority that it envies and hates.

Among these odd folk, who correspond exactly to the decadent element of — white trashII in the South, law and morals are non-existent; and their general mental status is probably below that of any other section of the native American people.

lo que se hace por humanidad es a veces cruelmente juzgado por la ley.

This is a great problem,' he said. 'In countries where perhaps the police are associated with the former rulers, when independence comes there will be elements who are not willing to accept that they too must come under the same law as every other citizen.

Ef maður vill stela í þjófafélagi, þá verður að stela samkvæmt lögum; og helst að hafa tekið þátt í því að setja lögin sjálfur.

He felt like a criminal, though the only laws he'd broken were his own, and he wasn't sure which ones they were.

But this was a moral question, and the answer to it may not have been legally relevant.

For, obviously, things were not as simple as the framers of laws had imagined them to be, and if it was of small legal relevance, it was of great political interest to know how long it takes an average person to overcome his innate repugnance toward crime, and what exactly happens to him once he had reached that point. To this question, the case of Adolf Eichmann supplied an answer that could not have been clearer and more precise.