Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Law.
Going to trial with a lawyer who considers your whole life-style a Crime in Progress is not a happy prospect.
Hunter S. Thompson
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 more use to the professors than the justice of it.
Charles Macklin
The court is like a palace of marble; it's composed of people very hard and very polished.
Jean de la Bruyere
Where the law ends tyranny begins.
Henry Fielding
Judges ought to be more learned than witty, more reverent than plausible, and more advised than confident. Above all things, integrity is their portion and proper virtue.
Francis Bacon
Legislation, both statutory and constitutional, is enacted, it is true, from an experience of evils but its general language should not, therefore, be necessarily confined to the form that evil had theretofore taken. Time works changes, brings into existence new conditions and purposes. Therefore a principle, to be vital, must be capable of wider application than the mischief which gave it birth. This is peculiarly true of constitutions. They are not ephemeral enactments, designed to meet passing occasions. They are, to use the words of Chief Justice Marshall, 'designed to approach immortality as nearly as human institutions can approach it.' The future is their care, and provision for events of good and bad tendencies of which no prophecy can be made. In the application of a constitution, therefore, our contemplation cannot be only of what has been, but of what may be. Under any other rule a constitution would indeed be as easy of application as it would be deficient in efficacy and power. Its general principles would have little value, and be converted by precedent into impotent and lifeless formulas. Rights declared in words might be lost in reality. And this has been recognized. The meaning and vitality of the Constitution have developed against narrow and restrictive construction.
Joseph McKenna, WEEMS v. U.S., 2
The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.
Quentin Crisp
Somebody figured it out -- we have 35 million laws trying to enforce Ten Commandments.
Earl Wilson
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
The United States is the greatest law factory the world has ever known.
Charles Hughes
All breathing, existing, living, sentient creatures should not be slain nor treated with violence, nor abused, nor tormented, nor driven away. This is the pure unchangeable law.
Sutrakritanga
Laws are not invented. They grow out of circumstances.
Azarias
Written laws are like spider's webs; they will catch, it is true, the weak and the poor, but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.
Anacharsis
Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty.
Henry M. Robert
Law, without force, is impotent.
Blaise Pascal
Law and equity are two things which God has joined, but which man has put asunder.
Charles Caleb Colton
As soon as you begin to say We have always done things this way -- perhaps that might be a better way, conscious law-making is beginning. As soon as you begin to say We do things this way -- they do things that way -- what is to be done about it? men are beginning to feel towards justice, that resides between the endless jar of right and wrong.
Helen M. Cam
Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The trouble with law is lawyers.
Clarence Darrow
It is impossible for us to break the law. We can only break ourselves against the law.
Cecil B. De Mille
