3,047 Quotes About Law

It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do.

A good parson once said that where mystery begins religion ends. Cannot I say, as truly at least, of human laws, that where mystery begins justice ends?

Whenever government abandons law, it proclaims anarchy.

In effect, to follow, not to force the public inclination; to give a direction, a form, a technical dress, and a specific sanction, to the general sense of the community, is the true end of legislature.

And even one life that bears witness to the truth of the prosperity law will quicken the consciousness of the whole community.

Since my logic aims to teach and instruct the understanding, not that it may with the slender tendrils of the mind snatch at and lay hold of abstract notions (as the common logic does), but that it may in very truth dissect nature, and discover the virtues and actions of bodies, with their laws as determined in matter; so that this science flows not merely from the nature of the mind, but also from the nature of things.

The law has been perverted through the influence of two very different causes-naked greed and misconceived philanthropy.

No society can exist if respect for the law does not to some extent prevail; but the surest way to have the laws respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality are in contradiction, the citizen finds himself in the cruel dilemma of either losing his moral sense or of losing respect for the law, two evils of which one is as great as the other, and between which it is difficult to choose.

What, then is law [government]? It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense.