Quotes About Laws

Censorship laws are blunt instruments, not sharp scalpels. Once enacted, they are easily misapplied to merely unpopular or only marginally dangerous speech.

No duty, however, binds us to these so-called laws, whose corrupting influence menaces what is noblest in our being.

Freedom comes from human beings, rather than from laws and institutions.

What is the good of telling a community that it has every liberty except the liberty to make laws? The liberty to make laws is what constitutes a free people.

Where the realm of freedom of thought and action begin, the determination of individuals according to generic laws ends.

Freedom of conscience is a natural right, both antecedent and superior to all human laws and institutions whatever; a right which laws never gave and a right which laws can never take away.

Where has the genius of the pedistal [sic] of the laws and constitution of our boasted country fled?

To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit.

The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced.

My feeling is religious insofar as I am imbued with the consciousness of the insufficiency of the human mind to understand more deeply the harmony of the Universe which we try to formulate as "laws of nature

Men fight for freedom, then they begin to accumulate laws to take it away from themselves.

Sickness is the vengeance of nature for the violation of her laws.

Indeed, the quality that made Newton's theories truly stand out-the inherent characteristic that turned them into inevitable laws of nature-was precisely the fact that they were all expressed as crystal-clear, self-consistent mathematical relations.

The result that Noether obtained was stunning. She showed that to every continuous symmetry of the laws of physics there corresponds a conservation law and vice versa.

An older, Puritan approach to Scripture tended to prevail in the American South, where the Bible was regarded as a set of definite, positive laws

These are all problems in non-equilibrium physics, the physics of complex systems, or, to coin a new term historical physics. If the laws of physics are ultimately simple, why is the world so complex? Why don't eco-systems and economies reveal the same simplicity as Newton's laws? The answer, in a word, is history.

Congress routinely exempted itself from the laws it imposed on the citizens, much as the ruling parties in Russia and China do. Consequently, the five hundred thirty-five members of Congress could freely and legally trade stocks on inside information whereas the other three hundred million Americans could not. Frank disagreed with the law, but it was still the law.

The federal government makes, executes, and adjudicates the laws. It even determines the extent to which it will comply with the Constitution, which was established in the first place to prevent governmental arrogation.

Obama has repeatedly defied the limits of his constitutional authority, aggregating powers unto himself in ways past presidents have not. During more than six years as president, Obama has nullified laws, created laws, delayed the implementation of laws, and issued exemptions from and waivers to laws, much of which has been accomplished through executive branch rule making.

When legislative power is united with executive power in a single person or in a simple body of magistracy, there is no liberty, because one can fear that the same monarch or senate that makes tyrannical laws will execute them tyrannically. . . .

The laws of economics, like the laws of science, are real, unlike the utopian images and empty assurances of expedient and self-aggrandizing politicians and bureaucrats.

The laws of economics, like the laws of science, are real, unlike the utopian images and empty assurances of expedient and self-aggrandizing politicians and bureaucrats. There is a point of irreversibility from which no generation and the larger society can recover.

We thus see the artist performing a dual function: first, furthering the integrity of the process of self-expression in the language of art; and secondly, protecting the organic continuity of art in relation to its own laws. For like any organic substance, art must always be in a state of flux, the tempo being slow or fast. But it must move.

Laws are sand, customs are rock. Laws can be evaded and punishment escaped but an openly transgressed custom brings sure punishment.