Edmund Burke - Law Quotes

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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?

Edmund Burke
It is the function of a judge not to make but to declare the law, according to the golden mete-wand of the law and not by the crooked cord of discretion.

Edmund Burke
There is but one law for all, namely, that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity — the law of nature, and of nations.

Edmund Burke
In no country perhaps in the world is law so general a study [as in America].... This study renders men acute, inquisitive, dexterous, prompt in attack, ready in defense, full of resources.... They augur misgovernment at a distance, and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.

Edmund Burke
To execute laws is a royal office; to execute orders is not to be a king. However, a political executive magistracy, though merely such, is a great trust.

Edmund Burke
We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature, and the means perhaps of its conservation.

Edmund Burke
Manners are of more importance than laws. The law can touch us here and there, now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation like that of the air we breathe in.

Edmund Burke
The most favourable laws can do very little towards the happiness of people when the disposition of the ruling power is adverse to them.

Edmund Burke
In no country, perhaps, in the world is the law so general a study. The profession itself is numerous and powerful, and in most provinces [in America] it takes the lead.

Edmund Burke
People crushed by law have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws; and those, who have much to hope and nothing to lose, will always be dangerous, more or less.

Edmund Burke
In this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood, binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties, adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections, keeping inseparable and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars.

Edmund Burke
All human laws are, properly speaking, only declaratory; they have no power over the substance of original justice.

Edmund Burke
I have been told by an eminent bookseller, that in no branch of his business, after tracts of popular devotion, were so many books as those on the law exported to the Plantations.

Edmund Burke
Laws are commanded to hold their tongues among arms; and tribunals fall to the ground with the peace they are no longer able to uphold.

Edmund Burke
The power of discretionary disqualification by one law of Parliament, and the necessity of paying every debt of the Civil List by another law of Parliament, if suffered to pass unnoticed, must establish such a fund of rewards and terrors as will make Parliament the best appendage and support of arbitrary power that ever was invented by the wit of man.

Edmund Burke