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Quotes About Laws

What irritates me is the bland way people go around saying, 'Oh, our attitude has changed. We don't dislike these people any more.' But by the strangest coincidence, they haven't taken away the injustice; the laws are still on the books.
~ Christopher Isherwood
In the end, nature is inexorable: it has no reason to hurry and, sooner or later, it takes what belongs to it. Unconsciously and inflexibly obedient to its own laws, it doesn't know art, just as it doesn't know freedom, just as it doesn't know goodness.
~ Ivan Turgenev
Foreign agents are taking advantage of loopholes in our laws.
~ Amy Klobuchar
Because policymakers often rely on think tanks' research when crafting laws and regulations, it's critical to know whether these organizations are truly independent.
~ Elizabeth Warren
And if families start scattering like stars you can pass laws based on food, rejection and the long drop justified to rock. The Saracens were not impressed. They yelled plunder loud enough for centuries to hear. And here men said to hell with it and left. Barring big rains now, accelerated erosion or a sudden real estate deal, this insufferable figure of Christ will stand over us all God knows how long. The town got smart and moved. You came back to see it. You are the one who failed.
~ Richard Hugo
There simply are no biblical laws that command regular fasting. Our freedom in the gospel, however, does not mean license; it means opportunity.
~ Richard J. Foster
I've become leery of religious advocacy for laws which only value a 'life' until it's born.
~ Richard North Patterson
Whoever imagined that ours was a government of laws and not men
~ Richard North Patterson
Christ as a new conqueror changes the fundamental laws of the old Adam and establishes a government of his own.
~ Richard Sibbes
Where Christ's laws are written in the heart, there all other good laws are best obeyed. None despise man's law but those that despise Christ's first.
~ Richard Sibbes
relaxation of the laws and regulations that govern who can offer legal services and from what types of business. This is a call for liberalization.
~ Richard Susskind
What was developing in the South was a coercive labor system, which although not slavery, was not free labor either. It depended on extralegal violence, coercive laws, burdensome debt relations, and the use of convict labor to limit alternatives. The South was demonstrating that there were routes to capitalist development—both agricultural and industrial—that did not rely on free labor.
~ Richard White
A laconic Texas lawmaker declined to use his considerable influence to intervene in a loud dispute between his colleagues. When asked why not, he said, They're not voting. If they're not voting, they're not passing any laws. If they're not passing any laws, they're not hurting anybody.
~ Robert A. Caro
The country and culture commonly known as America had had a badly split personality all through its history. Its overt laws were almost always puritanical for a people whose covert behavior tended to be Rabelaisian; its major religions were all Apollonian in varying degrees---its religious revivals were often hysterical in a fashion almost Dionysian.
~ Robert A. Heinlein
from George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra: "Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.
~ Robert A. Heinlein
The culture known as "America" had a split personality throughout its history. Its laws were puritanical; its covert behavior tended to be Rabelaisian; its major religions were Apollonian; its revivals were almost Dionysian. In the twentieth century (Terran Christian Era) nowhere on Earth was sex so vigorously suppressed—and nowhere was there such deep interest in it.
~ Robert A. Heinlein
The Universe was a silly place at best . . . but the least likely explanation for it was the no-explanation of random chance, the conceit that abstract somethings 'just happened' to be atoms that 'just happened' to get together in ways which 'just happened' to look like consistent laws and some configurations 'just happened' to possess self-awareness and that two 'just happened' to be the Man from Mars and a bald-headed old coot with Jubal inside.
~ Robert A. Heinlein
Respect for laws is a pragmatic matter. Women know this instinctively; that's why they are all smugglers. Men often believe — or pretend — that the 'Law' is something sacred, or at least a science.
~ Robert A. Heinlein
Absolute Laws in the Platonic sense cannot be known scientifically — as Plato himself realized. They can only be known (or imagined) by intuition or by some Act of Faith. Empirically and existentially, nobody knows today, right now, if we have any Absolute Laws in our intellectual common market. All that we know is that we have some models that work a lot better, practically, than some of the older models we have discarded.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
Or, as Einstein once said — quoted by Korzybski in Science and Sanity — Insofar as the laws of mathematics are certain, they do not refer to reality; and insofar as they refer to reality, they are not certain.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
This is, of course, the approach taken in those societies that have sought to control drugs by making them sacred and putting them in a religious context, as distinguished from those cultures that seek to control them by passing laws against them. Paradoxical as Crowley's reasoning may sound to most of us, many anthropologists have agreed that drugs are actually less of a social problem in the former context than in the latter.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
Mr. White believes that these are objective predictions based on eternal "laws" of karma which he learned from various occultists and gurus. He does not believe that the apocalyptical reality-tunnel in which he lives is in any way an artistic creation expressing his own emotional anxieties and hostilities.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
Back then, being a pawnbroker-merchant was one of the only career options available to Jews. Thanks to a papal decree centuries earlier, usury laws forbade Christians from lending for profit. So Jews took over the moneylending trades, becoming pawnbrokers, small trade merchants, and wizards of finance.
~ Kenneth L. Fisher
It's lawmakers know better than anyone that laws are more a matter of practical compromise than any kind of moral imperative.
~ Kim Stanley Robinson