Law Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Charles Darwin

Albert Einstein

Jules Verne

Franklin D. Roosevelt

John Locke

Leon Trotsky

John F. Kennedy

Any law which violates the inalienable rights of man is essentially unjust and tyrannical; it is not a law at all.

Maximilien Robespierre

The law was made for one thing alone, for the exploitation of those who don't understand it, or are prevented by naked misery from obeying it.

But while they prate of economic laws, men and women are starving. We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

You had to play the big scene, he said coldly. Stand on your rights, talk about the law. How ingenuous can a man get, Marlowe? A man like you who is supposed to know his way around. The law isn't justice. It's a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.

Raymond Chandler

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

We cannot prevent equilibrium from producing its effects. We may brave human laws, but we cannot resist natural ones.

I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

The basic laws of the universe are simple, but because our senses are limited, we can't grasp them. There is a pattern in creation.

Albert Einstein

But Goethe tells us in his greatest poem that Faust lost the liberty of his soul when he said to the passing moment: "Stay, thou art so fair." And our liberty, too, is endangered if we pause for the passing moment, if we rest on our achievements, if we resist the pace of progress. For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.

John F. Kennedy

The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.

Insurrection is an art, and like all arts has its own laws.

From early childhood his moral principles had struggled blindly with his interests, but he was certain of one law that ruled all others — masses of men invariably follow interests in deciding morals. Morality is a private and costly luxury.

Evolution is not a force but a process; not a cause but a law.

I suppose that writers should, in a way, feel flattered by the censorship laws. They show a primitive fear and dread at the fearful magic of print.

In any country there must be people who have to die. They are the sacrifices any nation has to make to achieve law and order.

As the most extravagant errors were received among the established articles of their faith, so the most infamous vices obtained in their practice, and were indulged not only with impunity, but authorized by the sanction of their laws.

The function of the law is not to provide justice or to preserve freedom. The function of the law is to keep those who hold power, in power.

Only this incident inseparable every custom must have, viz., that it be consonant to reason; for how long soever it hath continued, if it be against reason, it is of no force in law.

Woman throughout the ages has been mistress to the law, as man has been its master.

In the early West, law and politics were parallel roads to usefulness as well as distinction.

John George Nicolay

The acknowledged legislators of the world take the world as given. They dislike mysteries, for mysteries cannot be coded, or legislated, and wonder cannot be made into law. And so these legislators police the accepted frontiers of things.

… [Slave] trade … is the most shocking violation of the law of nature, has a direct tendency to diminish … liberty, and makes every dealer in it a tyrant, from the director of an African company to the petty chapman [peddler]…. It is a clear truth, that those who every day barter away other men's liberty will soon care little for their own.

The rescue of a person, who is assaulted, or restrained of his liberty, without authority of law, is not only morally, but legally, a meritorious act; for every body is under obligation to go to the assistance of one who is assailed by assassins, robbers, ravishers, kidnappers, or ruffians of any kind.

Lysander Spooner

Clarke's Law of Revolutionary Ideas:

Every revolutionary idea — in science, politics, art, or whatever — seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases:
(1) "It's completely impossible — don't waste my time";
(2) "It's possible, but it's not worth doing";
(3) "I said it was a good idea all along."

Arthur C. Clarke

[Boole's apparent goal was to] unfold the secret laws and relations of those high faculties of thought by which all beyond the merely perceptive knowledge of the world and of ourselves is attained or matured, is a object which does not stand in need of commendation to a rational mind.