Law Quotes

The Law is hard, but it is the Law.

~ Cassandra Clare

Only cops and vampires have to have an invitation to enter.

~ Christopher Moore

We may brave human laws, but we cannot resist natural ones.

~ Jules Verne

When honor and the Law no longer stand on the same side of the line, how do we choose[?]

~ Anne Bishop

Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.

~ Jonathan Swift

My main problem with cops is that they do what they're told. They say 'Sorry mate, I'm just doing my job' all the fucking time.

~ Banksy

All love is expansion, all selfishness is contraction. Love is therefore the only law of life. He who loves lives, he who is selfish is dying. Therefore love for love's sake, because it is the only law of life, just as you breathe to live.

~ Swami Vivekananda

Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself; and where they are, they should be changed. Nowhere is this more clear than in the laws against possession of marijuana in private for personal use... Therefore, I support legislation amending Federal law to eliminate all Federal criminal penalties for the possession of up to one ounce [28g] of marijuana.

~ Jimmy Carter

Federal and state laws (should) be changed to no longer make it a crime to possess marijuana for private use.

~ Richard M. Nixon

And although I broke a lot of laws as a teenager, I straightened out immediately upon turning eighteen, when I realized the state had a legal right to execute me.

~ George Carlin

The minute you read something that you can't understand, you can almost be sure that it was drawn up by a lawyer.

~ Will Rogers

Law applied to its extreme is the greatest injustice

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

There are laws. There are rules. And when you break them, there are consequences. Laws of nature and laws of life. Laws of love and laws of death.

~ Amy Harmon

I think that everything should be made available to everybody, and I mean LSD, cocaine, codeine, grass, opium, the works. Nothing on earth available to any man should be confiscated and made unlawful by other men in more seemingly powerful and advantageous positions.

~ Charles Bukowski

As one judge said to another judge: be just. And if you can’t be just, be arbitrary

~ William S. Burroughs

But the law is an odd thing. For instance, one country in Europe has a law that requires all its bakers to sell bread at the exact same price. A certain island has a law that forbids anyone from removing its fruit. And a town not too far from where you live has a law that bars me from coming within five miles of its borders.

~ Lemony Snicket

There are two Newman's laws. The first one is It is useless to put on your brakes when you're upside down. The second is Just when things look darkest, they go black.

~ Paul Newman

For a lawyer to do less than his utmost is, I strongly feel, a betrayal of his client. Though in criminal trials one tends to focus on the defense attorney and his client the accused, the prosecutor is also a lawyer, and he too has a client: the People. And the People are equally entitled to their day in court, to a fair and impartial trial, and to justice.

~ Vincent Bugliosi

I don't know who made the laws, But I know there ain't no law that you got to go hungry.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Most civilisation is based on cowardice. It's so easy to civilize by teaching cowardice. You water down the standards which would lead to bravery. You restrain the will. You regulate the appetites. You fence in the horizons. You make a law for every movement. You deny the existence of chaos. You teach even the children to breathe slowly. You tame.

~ Frank Herbert

The answer is that there is no good answer. So as parents, as doctors, as judges, and as a society, we fumble through and make decisions that allow us to sleep at night--because morals are more important than ethics, and love is more important than law.

~ Jodi Picoult

Now, legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways. Thus we have an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, benefits, subsidies, encouragements, progressive taxation, public schools, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, a right to the tools of labor, free credit, and so on, and so on.

~ Frédéric Bastiat

You are in favour of the common people?” said Dragon mildly.The common people?” said Vimes. “They’re nothing special. They’re no different from the rich and powerful except they’ve got no money or power. But the law should be there to balance things up a bit. So I suppose I’ve got to be on their side.

~ Terry Pratchett

Those fellows, they're always crying over killers. Never a thought for the victims.

~ Truman Capote

The rain that fell on the city runs down the dark gutters and empties into the sea without even soaking the ground

~ Haruki Murakami

The true source of our sufferings has been our timidity.

~ John Adams

The Odyssey is the story of motion both purposeful and purposeless, successful and futile. What else is the history of law?

~ Bernhard Schlink

It seemed to me that if the lawyers failed to do their duty, they ought to pay people for waiting upon them, instead of making them pay for it.

~ R.d. Blackmore

[American family court] is a system that is corrupt on his best day. It is like being tied to the back of a pickup truck and dragged down a gravel late at night. No one can hear your cries and complaints and it is not over until they say it's over.

~ Alec Baldwin

If you want good laws, burn those you have and make new ones.

~ Voltaire

Copyright law has got to give up its obsession with 'the copy.' The law should not regulate 'copies' or 'modern reproductions' on their own. It should instead regulate uses--like public distributions of copies of copyrighted work--that connect directly to the economic incentive copyright law was intended to foster.

~ Lawrence Lessig

I’m seventeen years old, my name is Juan García Madero, and I’m in my first semester of law school. I wanted to study literature, not law, but my uncle insisted, and in the end I gave in. I’m an orphan, and someday I’ll be a lawyer. That’s what I told my aunt and uncle, and then I shut myself in my room and cried all night.

~ Roberto Bolaño

Corruption ultimately guilts the corrupt, and it hardens the innocent who suffer as a result of it. It isn't the young who corrupt the old, rather it's the inverse.The aim of the old should be to ensure that the young grow up incorruptible.

~ Justin K. Mcfarlane Beau

You know, that man has a spirit, that each man and woman is unique, that we have duty to promote our unalienable rights and to protect them, that we have a duty to our families and ourselves, to take care of ourselves, to contribute to charity, that we have a duty to support a just and righteous law that is stable and predictable.

~ Mark R. Levin

Evil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified by law.

~ Pat Conroy

Judges... are picked out from the most dextrous lawyers, who are grown old or lazy, and having been biased all their lives against truth or equity, are under such a fatal necessity of favoring fraud, perjury and oppression, that I have known several of them to refuse a large bribe from the side where justice lay, rather than injure the faculty by doing any thing unbecoming their nature in office.

~ Jonathan Swift

The partisan wants to change the law, the criminal break it; the anarch wants neither. He is not for or against the law. While not acknowledging the law, he does try to recognize it like the laws of nature, and he adjusts accordingly.

~ Ernst Jünger

Every lawyer shall tell his or her client that becoming involved with the legal system is like three years of experimental chemotherapy, one hundred percent guaranteed not to work.

~ Lawrence Joseph

Crack had a social logic to it, a specific kind of reasoning that drew from a vast well of common experience for its symbolic resonance. Crack stood for pain and power, chaos and order, the truth behind the lie. Crack was a sociolegal logic grounded in blood.

~ Dimitri A. Bogazianos

All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them.

~ Felix Frankfurter