Mark Twain - Law Quotes

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Laws are sand, customs are rock. Law can be evaded and punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure punishment.

Mark Twain
You see, he knew his own laws just as other people so often know the laws: by words, not by effects. They take a meaning, and get to be very vivid, when you come to apply them to yourself.

Mark Twain
Every citizen of the republic ought to consider himself an unofficial policeman, and keep unsalaried watch and ward over the laws and their execution.

Mark Twain
Is not this insanity plea becoming rather common? Is it not so common that the reader confidently expects to see it offered in every criminal case that comes before the courts? [...] Really, what we want now, is not laws against crime, but a law against insanity.

Mark Twain
You can't reason with your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns.

Mark Twain
A reputable lawyer will advise you to keep out of the law, make the best of a foolish bargain, and not get caught again.

Mark Twain
So much blood has been shed by the Church because of an omission from the Gospel: "Ye shall be indifferent as to what your neighbor's religion is." Not merely tolerant of it, but indifferent to it. Divinity is claimed for many religions; but no religion is great enough or divine enough to add that new law to its code.

Mark Twain
I beseech your good lordship that order be taken to change this law—oh, let no more poor creatures be visited with its tortures.

Mark Twain
Senator: Person who makes laws in Washington when not doing time.

Mark Twain
Ages of restriction to the one tool which the law was not able to take from him—his brain—have made that tool singularly competent...

Mark Twain
To succeed in the other trades, capacity must be shown; in the law, concealment of it will do.

Mark Twain
Evolution is the law of policies: Darwin said it, Socrates endorsed it, Cuvier proved it and established it for all time in his paper on The Survival of the Fittest. These are illustrious names, this is a mighty doctrine: nothing can ever remove it from its firm base, nothing dissolve it, but evolution.

Mark Twain
That reminds me to remark, in passing, that the very first official thing I did, in my administration-and it was on the first day of it, too-was to start a patent office; for I knew that a country without a patent office and good patent laws was just a crab, and couldn't travel any way but sideways or backways.

Mark Twain
If we only had some God in the country's laws, instead of being in such a sweat to get him into the Constitution, it would be better all around.

Mark Twain
There are no witches. The witch text remains; only the practice has changed. Hell fire is gone, but the text remains. Infant damnation is gone, but the text remains. More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the texts that authorized them remain.

Mark Twain
Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.

Mark Twain
The humorist who invented trial by jury played a colossal practical joke upon the world, but since we have the system we ought to try and respect it. A thing which is not thoroughly easy to do, when we reflect that by command of the law a criminal juror must be an intellectual vacuum, attached to a melting heart and perfectly macaronian bowels of compassion.

Mark Twain
A crime persevered in a thousand centuries ceases to be a crime, and becomes a virtue. This is the law of custom, and custom supersedes all other forms of law.

Mark Twain
Those people.... early stricken of God, intellectually - the departmental interpreters of the laws in Washington... can always be depended on to take any reasonably good law and interpret the common sense all out of it.

Mark Twain
Circumstance - which moves by laws of its own, regardless of parties and policies, and whose decrees are final and must be obeyed by all - and will be

Mark Twain
Whenever a copyright law is to be made or altered, then the idiots assemble.

Mark Twain
The Jew has his other side. He has some discreditable ways, though he has not a monopoly of them... He has a reputation for various small forms of cheating, and for practising oppressive usury, and for burning himself out to get the insurance, and for arranging cunning contracts which leave him an exit but lock the other man in, and for smart evasions which find him safe and comfortable just within the strict letter of the law, when court and jury know very well that he has violated the spirit of it.

Mark Twain
What, then, is the true Gospel of consistency? Change. Who is the really consistent man? The man who changes. Since change is the law of his being, he cannot be consistent if he stick in a rut.

Mark Twain
All gentle cant and philosophizing to the contrary notwithstanding, no people in this world ever did achieve their freedom by goody-goody talk and moral suasion: it being immutable law that all revolutions that will succeed, must begin in blood.

Mark Twain
An injurious lie is an uncommendable thing; and so, also, and in the same degree, is an injurious truth—a fact that is recognized by the law of libel.

Mark Twain
Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it — namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.

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

Mark Twain
It [the press] has scoffed at religion till it has made scoffing popular. It has defended official criminals, on party pretexts, until it has created a United States Senate whose members are incapable of determining what crime against law and the dignity of their own body is—they are so morally blind—and it has made light of dishonesty till we have as a result a Congress which contracts to work for a certain sum and then deliberately steals additional wages out of the public pocket and is pained and surprised that anybody should worry about a little thing like that.

Mark Twain
None believe in me—neither wilt thou. But no matter—within the compass of a month thou shalt be free; and more, the laws that have dishonoured thee, and shamed the English name, shall be swept from the statute books. The world is made wrong; kings should go to school to their own laws, at times, and so learn mercy.

Mark Twain
It is my hope sir, that the ass who invented the "age of consent"—any age of consent between cradle and grave—is with his progenitors in hell, and that the legislatures that are keeping the resulting law in force will follow him soon.

Mark Twain