Legal Quotes

Famous Quotes on Law

• "Unless by the lawful judgment of their peers. " —Unattributed Author on Law
• "Where there are laws, he who has not broken them need not tremble. " —Vittorio Alfieri on Law
• "Law is king of all." —Henry Alford on Law
• "Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will like them only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them." —Anacharsis on Law
• "Law is a bottomless pit." —John Arbuthnot on Law
• "One of the Seven was wont to say: "That laws were like cobwebs; where the small flies were caught, and the great brake through."" —Francis Bacon on Law
• "All this is but a web of the wit; it can work nothing." —Francis Bacon on Law
• "Now, O king, establish the decree, and sign the writing, that it be not changed, according to the law of the Medes and Persians, which altereth not." —Bible on Law
• "Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the same, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God." —Bible on Law
• "But we know that the law is good, if a man use it lawfully; Knowing this, that the law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and for sinners, for unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers." —Bible on Law
• "To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them." —Bible on Law
• "They say unto him, Caesar's. Then saith he unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's." —Bible on Law
• "He that is surety for a stranger shall smart for it." —Bible on Law
• "Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy." —Louis D Brandeis on Law
• "There was an ancient Roman lawyer, of great fame in the history of Roman jurisprudence, whom they called Cui Bono, from his having first introduced into judicial proceedings the argument, "What end or object could the party have had in the act with which he is accused."" —Edmund Burke on Law
• "I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against an whole people." —Edmund Burke on Law
• "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 on Law
• "The law of England is the greatest grievance of the nation, very expensive and dilatory." —Bishop Gilbert Burnet on Law
• "Our wrangling lawyers . . . are so litigious and busy here on earth, that I think they will plead their clients' causes hereafter, some of them in hell." —Robert Burton on Law
• "Your pettifoggers damn their souls, To share with knaves in cheating fools." —Samuel Butler on Law
• "Is not the winding up witnesses, And nicking, more than half the bus'ness? For witnesses, like watches, go Just as they're set, too fast or slow; And where in Conscience they're strait-lac'd, 'Tis ten to one that side is cast." —Samuel Butler on Law
• "The law of heaven and earth is life for life." —Lord Byron on Law
• "Arms and laws do not flourish together." —Julius Caesar on Law
• "No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion." —Carrie Chapman Catt on Law
• "Who to himself is law, no law doth need, Offends no law, and is a king indeed." —George Chapman on Law
• "I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure -- that is all that agnosticism means." —Clarence Darrow on Law
• "This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice." —Oliver Wendell on Law
• "A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer." —Robert Frost on Law
• "Anarchy - it's not the law, it's just a good idea." —Anonymous on Law
• "I feel like a fugitive from the law of averages." —William H Mauldin on Law
• "The problem with any unwritten law is that you don't know where to go to erase it." —Glaser And Way on Law
• "If it weren't for my lawyer, I'd still be in prison. It went a lot faster with two people digging." —Mister Boffo on Law
• "A group of white South Africans recently killed a black lawyer because he was black. That was wrong. They should have killed him because he was a lawyer." —A Whitney Brown on Law
• "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." —Anatole France on Law
• "The most overlooked advantage to owning a computer is that if they foul up there's no law against whacking them around a little." —Porterfield on Law
• "Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand." —Putts Law on Law
• "The reason there is so little crime in Germany is that it's against the law." —Alex Levin on Law
• "For the skeptic there remains only one consolation: if there should be such a thing as superhuman law it is administered with subhuman inefficiency." —Eric Ambler on Law
• "The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced." —Frank Zappa on Law
• "I have forgotten more law than you ever knew, but allow me to say, I have not forgotten much." —Anon on Law
• "America is a country where, thanks to Congress, there are 40 million laws to enforce 10 commandments." —Anon on Law
• "The law is a strange thing. It makes a man swear to tell the truth, and every time he shows signs of doing so, some lawyer objects." —Anon on Law
• "If you laid all our laws end to end, there would be no end." —Arthur Bugs Baer on Law
• "Our system is not one of justice, but of law." —Edna Buchanan on Law
• "Men would be great criminals did they need as many laws as they break." —Charles John Darling on Law
• "The law is above the law, you know." —Dorothy Salisbury Davis on Law
• "It takes a long time to learn that a courtroom is the last place in the world for learning the truth." —Alice Koller on Law
• "Laws are only felt when the individual comes in conflict with them." —Suzanne La Follette on Law
• "Petty laws breed great crimes." —Ouida on Law
• "Law school taught me one thing: how to take two situations that are exactly the same and show how they are different." —Hart Pomerantz on Law
• "The law itself follows gold." —Propertius on Law
• "For many persons, law appears to be black magic--an obscure domain that can be fathomed only by the professional initiated into the mysteries." —Susan C Ross on Law
• "The mills of God work like lightning compared with the law." —Mary Stewart on Law
• "There is plenty of law at the end of a nightstick." —Grover A Whalen on Law
• "The law must be stable and yet it must not stand still." —Roscoe Pound on Law
• "The United States was founded by the violent overthrow of a violently founded throne." —O Anna Niemus on Law
• "A law is valuable not because it is law, but because there is right in it." —Henry Ward Beecher on Law
• "Litigant: a person about to give up his skin for the hope of retaining his bone." —Ambrose Bierce on Law
• "The law is not a "light" for you or any man to see by; the law is not an instrument of any kind. The law is a causeway upon which so long as he keeps to it a citizen may walk safely." —Robert Bolt on Law
• "The case has been going on for so long that I've forgotten whether I'm really innocent or guilty." —Ashleigh Brilliant on Law
• "An appeal is when ye ask wan court to show its contempt for another court." —Finley Peter Dunne on Law
• "The law's made to take care o' raskills." —George Eliot on Law
• "How noble the law, in its majestic equality, that both the rich and poor are equally prohibited from peeing in the streets, sleeping under bridges, and stealing bread!" —Anatole France on Law
• "A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer." —Robert Frost on Law
• "Law cannot persuade where it cannot punish." —Thomas Fuller on Law
• "The aim of law is the maximum gratification of the nervous system of man." —Learned Hand on Law
• "Those who are too lazy and comfortable to think for themselves and be their own judges obey the laws. Others sense their own laws within them." —Herman Hesse on Law
• "Laws that do not embody public opinion can never be enforced." —Elbert Hubbard on Law
• "We can not expect to breed respect for law and order among people who do not share the fruits of our freedom." —Hubert H Humphrey on Law
• "It is the trade of lawyers to question everything, yield nothing, and to talk by the hour." —Thomas Jefferson on Law
• "Every skilled person is to be believed with reference to his own art." —Legal Maxim on Law
• "It is not possible to make a bad law. If is is bad, it is not a law." —Carry Nation on Law
• "Law is no explanation of anything; law is simply a generalization, a category of facts. Law is neither a cause, nor a reason, nor a power, nor a coercive force. It is nothing but a general formula, a statistical table." —Florence Nightingale on Law
• "Wretches hang that jurymen may dine." —Alexander Pope on Law
• "Our very freedom is secure because we're a nation governed by laws, not by men. We cannot as citizens pick and choose the laws we will or will not obey." —Ronals Reagan on Law
• "It is criminal to steal a purse, daring to steal a fortune, a mark of greatness to steal a crown. The blame diminishes as the guilt increases." —Friedrich Von Schiller on Law
• "Ignorance of the law excuses no man." —John Selden on Law
• "It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive." —Earl Warren on Law
• "Justice Stevens is one of those who are most sensitive to the least powerful in our society." —Senator Paul Simon on Law
• "Any law that takes hold of a man's daily life cannot prevail in a community, unless the vast majority of the community are actively in favor of it. The laws that are the most operative are the laws which protect life." —Henry Ward Beecher on Law
• "Those learned in the law, when they do give advice without the usual fee, and in the confidence of friendship, generally say, "Pay, pay anything rather than go to law."." —Isabella Beeton on Law
• "No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature." —Ralph Waldo Emerson on Law
• "If one man can be allowed to determine for himself what is law, every man can. That means first chaos, then tyranny. Legal process is an essential part of the democratic process." —Felix Frankfurter on Law
• "A successful lawsuit is the one worn by the policeman." —Robert Frost on Law
• "Where law ends, tyranny begins." —William Pitt on Law
• "You can't legislate intelligence and common sense into people." —Will Rogers on Law
• "No man is above the law and no man is below it; nor do we ask any man's permission when we ask him to obey it." —Theodore Roosevelt on Law
• "To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all laws into contempt." —Elizabeth Cady Stanton on Law
• "Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies but which let wasps and hornets break through." —Jonathan Swift on Law
• "The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state." —Tacitus on Law
• "I can't do literary work for the rest of this year because I'm meditating another lawsuit and looking around for a defendant." —Mark Twain on Law
• "I was never ruined but twice: once when I lost a lawsuit and once when I won one." —Voltaire on Law
• "When you have no basis for an argument, abuse the plaintiff." —Cicero on Law
• "Law and equity are two things which God hath joined, but which man hath put asunder." —Charles Caleb Colton on Law
• "The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly." —Abraham Lincoln on Law
• "Because just as good morals, if they are to be maintained, have need of the laws, so the laws, if they are to be observed, have need of good morals." —Niccolo Machiavelli on Law
• "If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made." —Otto Von Bismarck on Law

Wikiquote Article on Law

Law is an umbrella term for the written or understood rules that concern behaviors within and between societies and the appropriate consequences thereof.

Sourced

• First Law of Law: You can't invent the wheel without bending the rules.
  • Leonid S. Sukhorukov, All About Everything (2005)
• If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for the law. It invites every man to become a law unto himself. It invites anarchy.
  • U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, dissenting; Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 1928
• The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself.
  • Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853)
• We must not make a scarecrow of the law,
  Setting it up to fear the birds of prey,
  And let it keep one shape, till custom make it
  Their perch and not their terror.
  • William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure (c. 1604), Act II, scene i.
• The rule of law can be wiped out in one misguided, however will-intentioned generation. And if that should happen, it could take a century of striving and ordeal to restore it, and then only at the cost of the lives of many good men and women.
  • William T. Gossett, President of the American Bar Association, August 9, 1969 speech.
• The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science, that smiles in yer face while it picks yer pocket; and the glorious uncertainty of it is of mair use to the professors than the justice of it.
  • Charles Macklin, Love à la Mode (1759), Act ii. Sc. 1.
• Because the laws of this country do not prevent the strong from crushing the weak.
  • Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom: A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People
• Necessity creates the law,â"it supersedes rules; and whatever is reasonable and just in such cases is likewise legal.
  • William Scott, 1st Baron Stowell, The Gratitude (1801), 3 Rob. Adm. Rep. 240. Note that "The Gratitude" is the name of a legal case in admiralty, such cases being styled by the name of the vessel at issue.
• All laws authorize violence; otherwise they wouldnât be laws. Theyâd be suggestions.
  • Paul Rosenberg, Mindless Slogans
• A law, to be respectable, should match and protect human life, freedom and progress. If this is not the case, then it is simply an order backed by violence.
  • Paul Rosenberg, Mindless Slogans

Unsourced

• The law is a trade secret and the public process a business owned and operated by the legal profession.
  • Patrick Eberhart
• Technology is a sprinter, the law is a marathon runner.
  • A.K.T. Rex
• There is no jewel in the world comparable to learning; no learning so excellent as knowledge of laws.
  • Edward Coke
• The law is what it is - a majestic edifice, sheltering all of us, each stone of which rests on another.
  • John Galsworthy
• Fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalized medium of reason, that's all we have standing between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feeling.
  • Justice Felix Frankfurter.
• If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made.
  • Otto von Bismarck
• Instead of the law serving the people, it is the people that serve the law.
  • Amir Afsai
• The law is a bottomless pit.
  • John Arbuthnot
• Legislate in haste, repent at leisure.
  • proverb
• Covenants without the sword are but words.
  • Thomas Hobbes
• Law cannot persuade where it cannot punish.
  • Thomas Fuller
• No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be within the law? The law is stationary. The law is fixed. The law is a chariot wheel which binds us all regardless of conditions or place or time.
  • Emma Goldman
• So you think the police foresees and knows everything. The police invents more than it discovers.
  • Napoléon Bonaparte
• A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.
  • Robert Frost
• Executing a murderer is the only way to adequately express our horror at the taking of an innocent life. Nothing else suffices. To equate the lives of killers with those of victims is the worst kind of moral equivalency. If capital punishment is state murder, then imprisonment is state kidnapping and restitution is state theft.
  • Don Feder
• It is not the responsibility of the government or the legal system to protect a citizen from himself.
  • Justice Casey Percell
• More laws can't make us safe from the tragedies that are the inevitable result of freedom, and of living around other people. Life is real, life is uncertain, life is inevitably unsafe. Measures to make it safe at all costs come with dangers of their own.
  • Brian Doherty
• There are no good laws except simple laws.
  • Chrétien de Malesherbes (1775)
• Morality cannot be legislated but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart but they can restrain the heartless.
  • Martin Luther King
• One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.
  • Martin Luther King
• Land is built by law.
  • Old Swedish Law book
• We live in and by the law. It makes us what we are: citizens and employees and doctors and spouses and people who own things. It is sword, shield, and menace: we insist on our wage, or refuse to pay our rent, or are forced to forfeit penalties, or are closed up in jail, all in the name of what our abstract and ethereal sovereign, the law, has decreed. And we argue about what it has decreed, even when the books that are supposed to record its commands and directions are silent; we act then as if law had muttered its doom, too low to be heard distinctly. We are subjects of law's empire, liegemen to its methods and ideals, bound in spirit while we debate what we must therefore do.
  • Ronald Dworkin, Preface to Law's Empire
• Once you attempt legislation upon religious grounds, you open the way for every kind of intolerance and religious persecution.
  • William Butler Yeats
• If a law is unjust, we owe it to our children to disobey.
  • Sudo
• Let all the laws be clear, uniform and precise. To interpret laws is almost always to corrupt them.
  • Voltaire
• Tis much more prudence to acquit two persons, though actually guilty, than to pass sentence of condemnation on one that is virtuous and innocent.
  • Voltaire
• Prisoner: I want to ask whether it is likely â"
  Arabin: We have nothing to do with what is likely or unlikely: so many unlikely things happen in courts of justice that public time must not be wasted on such enquiries.
  • Commissioner Serjeant Arabin, quoted by Stephen Tumim in Great Legal Fiascos, page 115.
  • Arabin's surreal absurdities from the bench at the Old Bailey in the early 1800s made him a cult figure among young barristers.
• Laws are only observed with the consent of the individuals concerned and a moral change still depends on the individual and not on the passage of any law.
  • Eleanor Roosevelt
• Laws: We know what they are, and what they are worth! They are spider webs for the rich and mighty, steel chains for the poor and weak, fishing nets in the hands of government.
  • Pierre Proudhon
• The Law is the true embodiment,
  Of everything that's excellent,
  It has no kind of fault or flaw,
  And I, my Lords, embody the Law.
  • W.S. Gilbert (Iolanthe)
• Who ever knew an honest brute/ at law his neighbor prosecute?
  • Johnathan Swift, The Logicians Refuted, 1735