Quotes About Law

We must proceed with a full realization that no statute enacted by man can repeal the inexorable laws of nature.

I think our police are excellent, probably because I have not done anything that has occasioned being beaten up by these good men.

They made and recorded a sort of institute and digest of anarchy, called the rights of man.

Every libel, which is called famosus libellus, is made either against a private man, or against a public person. If it be against a private man, it deserves a severe punishment.

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.

If one man can be allowed to determine for himself what is law, every man can. That means first chaos, then tyranny. Legal process is an essential part of the democratic process.

Law is nothing else but the best reason of wise men applied for ages to the transactions and business of mankind.

All men are not created equal but should be treated as though they were under the law.

Whereas the law is passionless, passion must ever sway the heart of man.

The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence.

Man, as a physical being, is like other bodies governed by invariable laws.

If Nixon is not forced to turn over tapes of his conversations with the ring of men who were conversing on their violations of the law, then liberty will soon be dead in this nation.

Either fraternity is spontaneous, or it does not exist. To decree it is to annihilate it. The law can indeed force men to remain just; in vain would it try to force them to be self-sacrificing.

No man has ever yet been hanged for breaking the spirit of a law.

The enforcement of the law cannot depend on the justice of a cause or one man's conscience.

Extreme law is often extreme injustice.

Woe unto them who are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight!… Therefore, as the fire devoureth the stubble, and the flame consumeth the chaff, so their root shall be as rottenness, and their blossom shall go up as dust, because they have cast away the law of the Lord of hosts, and despised the word of the Holy One of Israel.

is a short step to licensed murder, especially when it is for so-called public benefit.

Criminal law, in which the state detects the offence, takes the accused to court and demands and imposes punishment, simply did not exist in early medieval society.

The old law vindicated itself by the vengeance of the sword, and plucked out eye for eye, and requited injury with punishment; but the new law pointed to clemency, and changed the former savagery of swords and lances into tranquility, and refashioned the former infliction of war upon rivals and foes of the law into the peaceful acts of ploughing and cultivating the earth. And so . . . the observance of the new law and of spiritual circumcision has shone forth in acts of peaceful obedience.

There is no law against composing music when one has no ideas whatsoever. The music of Wagner, therefore, is perfectly legal

T]he sacred sense of right and the reverence for the law, which it is difficult to destroy in the minds of the multitude, it is still more difficult to reproduce.

He was one of those men who are capable it may be of a crime, but not of insubordination; in a good as in a bad sense, he was thoroughly a soldier. Men of mark respect the law as a moral necessity, ordinary men as a traditional everyday rule; for this very reason military discipline, in which more than anywhere else law takes the form of habit, fetters every man not entirely self-reliant as with a magic spell.

No man is above the law and no man below it.