Law Quotes

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There is no man, good as he may be, who, if all his thoughts and actions were submitted to the scrutiny of the laws, would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.

Michel de Montaigne

Observation is so wide awake, and facts are being so rapidly added to the sum of human experience, that it appears as if the theorizer would always be in arrears, and were doomed forever to arrive at imperfect conclusion; but the power to perceive a law is equally rare in all ages of the world, and depends but little on the number of facts observed.

Henry David Thoreau

What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly — that is the first law of nature.

Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If I made laws for Shakers or a school, I should gazette every Saturday all the words they were wont to use in reporting religious experience, as spiritual life, God, soul, cross, etc., and if they could not find new ones next week, they might remain silent.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

All material Things seem to have been composed of the hard and solid Particles... variously associated with the first Creation by the Counsel of an intelligent Agent. For it became him who created them to set them in order: and if he did so, it is unphilosophical to seek for any other Origin of the World, or to pretend that it might arise out of a Chaos by the mere Laws of Nature.

Laws should be clear, uniform, precise: to interpret them is nearly always to corrupt them.

Good laws lead to the making of better ones; bad ones bring about worse.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

God Himself has reserved no right of revision of His own laws nor is there any need for Him for any such revision.

Good laws, if they are not obeyed, do not constitute good government.

Socialism, hypnotism, patriotism, materialism, fools making laws for the breaking of jaws.

To treat anyone as if they were less than human, less than a brother or a sister, no matter what they have done, is to contravene the very laws of our humanity.

Scientific laws, when we have reason to think them accurate, are different in form from the common-sense rules which have exceptions: they are always, at least in physics, either differential equations or statistical averages.

Bertrand Russell

"Do you ever read any of the books you burn?" "That's against the law!" "Oh. Of course."

Where every man in a state has a vote, brutal laws are impossible.

The axioms of physics translate the laws of ethics. Thus, "the whole is greater than its part;" "reaction is equal to action;" "the smallest weight may be made to lift the greatest, the difference of weight being compensated by time;" and many the like propositions, which have an ethical as well as physical sense. These propositions have a much more extensive and universal sense when applied to human life, than when confined to technical use.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Thomas Jefferson

There is no man so good, who, were he to submit all his thoughts and actions to the laws, would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.

Michel de Montaigne

Usurpers always bring about or select troublous times to get passed, under cover of the public terror, destructive laws, which the people would never adopt in cold blood. The moment chosen is one of the surest means of distinguishing the work of the legislator from that of the tyrant.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The rule of joy and the law of duty seem to me all one.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

There is something in this universe that justifies the biblical writer in saying, "You shall reap what you sow." This is a law-abiding universe. This is a moral universe. It hinges on moral foundations. If we are to make of this a better world, we've got to go back and rediscover that precious value that we've left behind.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Mankind by their industry, and by the influence of good laws, have rendered the earth more proper for their abode.

Many are the exercises of power reserved to the States wherein a uniformity of proceeding would be advantageous to all. Such are quarantines, health laws, regulations of the press, banking institutions, training militia, etc., etc.

Thomas Jefferson

A free people [claim] their rights, as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.

Thomas Jefferson

The sage says that all that is under heaven incurs the same law and the same fate.

Michel de Montaigne