quotations about law
Laws too gentle are seldom obeyed; too severe, seldom executed.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Poor Richard's Almanack, 1756
I hope I am over wary; but if I am not, there is, even now, something of ill-omen, amongst us. I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice. This disposition is awfully fearful in any and that it now exists in ours, though grating to our feelings to admit, it would be a violation of truth and an insult to our intelligence to deny.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
address to the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, January 27, 1838
The law should be the point at which savagery ended because civilization stood in its path.
ARIANA FRANKLIN
Mistress of the Art of Death
We are talking about obedience to law--law, this marvelous invention of modern times, which we attribute to Western civilization, and which we talk about proudly. The rule of law, oh, how wonderful, all these courses in Western civilization all over the land. Remember those bad old days when people were exploited by feudalism? Everything was terrible in the Middle Ages--but now we have Western civilization, the rule of law. The rule of law has regularized and maximized the injustice that existed before the rule of law, that is what the rule of law has done. Let us start looking at the rule of law realistically, not with the metaphysical complacency with which we always examined it before.
HOWARD ZINN
Voices of a People's History of the United States
It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished. But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, 'whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,' and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever.
JOHN ADAMS
attributed, John Adams: His Words
I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution.
ULYSSES S. GRANT
Inaugural Address, Mar. 4, 1869
For all laws are general judgements, or sentences of the legislator; as also every particular judgement is a law to him whose case is judged.
THOMAS HOBBES
Leviathan
We are either a nation of laws or we aren't.
CURTICE MANG
"Satire: Nogales, no English: Where the law is an ass", Communities Digital News, March 29, 2016
Accursed be the city where the laws would stifle nature's!
LORD BYRON
The Two Foscari
The Laws of Nature are just, but terrible. There is no weak mercy in them. Cause and consequence are inseparable and inevitable. The elements have no forbearance. The fire burns, the water drowns, the air consumes, the earth buries. And perhaps it would be well for our race if the punishment of crimes against the Laws of Man were as inevitable as the punishment of crimes against the Laws of Nature -- were Man as unerring in his judgments as Nature.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Table-Talk
The law is like Swiss cheese. The holes are the truth, and lawyers are like roaches crawling through the cheese. You can use the holes to get from one part of the cheese to another, but you can't eat the holes, you can only eat the cheese.
DON NIGRO
Tainted Justice
Law: an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community.
THOMAS AQUINAS
Summa Theologica
Written laws are formulas in which we endeavor to express as concisely as possible that which, under such or such determined circumstances, natural justice demands.
VICTOR COUSIN
attributed, The Historical Wisdom of the Ages and Sages
In my opinion, the law is not abstract, nor is the U.S. Constitution inherently good. The Constitution condoned 89 years of slavery in the U.S., and common law condoned 156 years of slavery before that. If history demonstrates anything, it is that the law is not the arbiter of morality but a parody of it. Legal justification should be regarded as the lowest rationale for a society's state of affairs, and yet the law is always our first form of recourse in adjudicating differences in public policy.
JOHN WINSTEAD
"Law is too small to contain social justice", WKU Herald, March 23, 2016
I call that law universal, which is conformable merely to dictates of nature; for there does exist naturally an universal sense of right and wrong, which, in a certain degree, all intuitively divine, even should no intercourse with each other, nor any compact have existed.
ARISTOTLE
Rhetoric
In written laws, men ... make a difference between the letter and the sentence of the law: And when by the letter is meant whatsoever can be gathered from the bare words, 'tis well distinguished. For the significance of almost all words, are either themselves, or in the metaphorical use of them, ambiguous, and may be drawn in argument to make many senses, but there is only one sense of the law.
THOMAS HOBBES
Leviathan
He who dethrones the idea of law, bids chaos welcome in its stead.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
Notwithstanding, for the more public part of government, which is laws, I think good to note only one deficiency; which is, that all those which have written of laws have written either as philosophers or as lawyers, and none as statesmen.
FRANCIS BACON
The Advancement of Learning
The trend towards throwing new laws at everything continues apace.
JOHN GARDNER
"When law is part of the problem", Oxford University Press blog, September 14, 2012
The centripetal absorption in the home-made mysteries and sleight-of-hand of the law would be a perfectly harmless occupation if it did not consume so much time and energy that might better be spent otherwise. And if it did not, incidentally, consume so much space in the law libraries. It seems never to have occurred to most of the studious gents who diddle around in the law reviews with the intricacies of contributory negligence, consideration, or covenants running with the land that neither life nor law can be confined within the forty-four corners of some cozy concept. It seems never to have occurred to them that they might be diddling while Rome burned.
FRED RODELL
"Goodbye to Law Reviews", 23 Virginia Law Review 38-45, Nov. 1936