Law Quotes

“I will make a Star-chamber matter of it.”

“The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property - either as a child, a wife, or a concubine - must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.”

“Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.”

“Laws just or unjust may govern men's actions. Tyrannies may restrain or regulate their words. The machinery of propaganda may pack their minds with falsehood and deny them truth for many generations of time. But the soul of man thus held in trance or frozen in a long night can be awakened by a spark coming from God knows where and in a moment the whole structure of lies and oppression is on trial for its life.”

“If you step out of a tenth story window you do not break the law of gravity, you confirm it.”

“The judge weighs the arguments and puts a brave face on the matter, and since there must be a decision, decides as he can, and hopes he has done justice and given satisfaction to the community”

“Motion or change, and identity or rest, are the first and second secrets of nature: Motion and Rest. The whole code of her laws may be written on the thumbnail, or the signet of a ring.”

“Forget the laws. If the laws don't make sense, if they run contrary to your conscience, you have to disobey them.”

“It was evident however that the lawyers would have to have their say....This also opened up a vista both lengthy and obscure.”

“Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well. What satire on government can equal the severity of censure conveyed in the word politics ....?”

“There is something servile in the habit of seeking after a law which we must obey.”

“What we seek is the reign of law, based upon the consent of the governed and sustained by the organized opinion of mankind.”

“Bagehot did what so many thousand of young graduates before him had done,--he studied for the bar; and then, having prepared himself to practise law, followed another large body of young men in deciding to abandon it.”

“One precedent in favor of power is stronger than a hundred against it.”

“That one hundred and fifty lawyers should do business together ought not to be expected.”

“There are other places at which ... the laws have said there shall be towns; but Nature has said there shall not, and they remain unworthy of enumeration.”

“Taste cannot be controlled by law. We must resist at all costs any attempt to regulate our individual freedoms and to legislate our personal moralities.”

“The law that will work is merely the summing up in legislative form of the moral judgment that the community has already reached.”

“The profession I chose was politics; the profession I entered was law. I entered the one because I thought it would lead to the other.”

“If you make 10,000 regulations you destroy all respect for the law.”

“Although we are free by the law, we are not so in practice.”

“Where the law of the majority ceases to be acknowledged, there government ends; the law of the strongest takes its place, and life and property are his who can take them.”

“Ignorance of the law is no excuse in any country. If it were, the laws would lose their effect, because it can always be pretended.”

“An equal application of law to every condition of man is fundamental.”

“I am mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, the sale of a book can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too.”