Law Quotations

It seems to be a law of nature, inflexible and inexorable, that those who will not risk cannot win.

Any idea, plan, or purpose may be placed in the mind through repetition of thought.

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

If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.

Laws made by common consent must not be trampled on by individuals.

The issue of equal rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals has vexed politicians for decades. I have my own cloudy history with the issue, having supported a law in Mississippi that made it illegal for LGBT couples to adopt children. I believed at the time this was a principled position based on my faith.

In my public service, I treasure my friendship with law enforcement officers. I admire what they do and support them in every aspect of their job. I have always looked upon law enforcement officers as my friends.

If Moses had gone to Harvard Law School and spent three years working on the Hill, he would have written the Ten Commandments with three exceptions and a saving clause.

It is a good thing to follow the First Law of Holes: if you are in one, stop digging.

Later in that administration, I was asked to take a job which I had to turn down as Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs because we were just then putting together the merger of two small law firms that became this law firm. I couldn't leave them at that point.

Law enforcement officers are never 'off duty.' They are dedicated public servants who are sworn to protect public safety at any time and place that the peace is threatened. They need all the help that they can get.

Who would give a law to lovers? Love is unto itself a higher law.

I think you can get to a point where nihilism, if that's the right word, is overwhelming, and the basic laws that society has set up - either religious or social laws - become meaningless.

I believe that the Laws of Karma do not apply to show business, where good things happen to bad people on a fairly regular basis.

I draw a distinction between traditional Islam and Islamism. Islamism emerged in its modern form in the 1920s and is driven by a belief that Muslims can be strong and rich again if they follow the Islamic law severely and in its entirety. This is a response to the trauma of modern Islam.

Finally, a good prosecutor knows that her job is to enforce the law without fear or favor. Likewise, a Supreme Court Justice must interpret the laws without fear or favor.

Especially with sports cars, when you have got so many cars on the track with various degrees of competitiveness, then something will happen. It's the nature of racing, the law of averages. If you want to be a front-runner then you are going to have to push very hard, and collisions can happen.

If this work can contribute in any way toward proving this, and at the same time arouse the conscience of the American people to a demand for justice to every citizen, and punishment by law for the lawless, I shall feel I have done my race a service.

It is unfair to believe everything we hear about lawyers, some of it might not be true.

Our homeland is the whole world. Our law is liberty. We have but one thought, revolution in our hearts.

I gravitate toward the law, I think, certainly more times than not, because it's our best mechanism for legislating human behavior, and morality, and ethics.

Catholicism is a wide tent in terms of political and legal positions. We could have nine Catholics on the Supreme Court and a great deal of diversity toward the law.

The only thing more intimidating than a huge international film star is your mother-in-law.

Good laws are the offspring of bad actions.

If we are to fulfill the promise of this great Nation that everybody in our society has equal access to the law, obviously having the resources to have access to the law is extremely important.

Understand that sexuality is as wide as the sea. Understand that your morality is not law. Understand that we are you. Understand that if we decide to have sex whether safe, safer, or unsafe, it is our decision and you have no rights in our lovemaking.

Democracy must be built through open societies that share information. When there is information, there is enlightenment. When there is debate, there are solutions. When there is no sharing of power, no rule of law, no accountability, there is abuse, corruption, subjugation and indignation.

I myself believe that there will one day be time travel because when we find that something isn't forbidden by the over-arching laws of physics we usually eventually find a technological way of doing it.

The function of the law is not to provide justice or to preserve freedom. The function of the law is to keep those who hold power, in power.

No law can give power to private persons; every law transfers power from private persons to government.

Marriage is an institution fits in perfect harmony with the laws of nature; whereas systems of slavery and segregation were designed to brutally oppress people and thereby violated the laws of nature.

The legal right of a taxpayer to decrease the amount of what otherwise would be his taxes, or altogether avoid them, by means which the law permits, cannot be doubted.

I have an affinity for the law. I like looking at the small type on contracts, and if I could have afforded law school, I probably would have gone.

The more we learn of science, the more we see that its wonderful mysteries are all explained by a few simple laws so connected together and so dependent upon each other, that we see the same mind animating them all.

The intellectual property situation is bad and getting worse. To be a programmer, it requires that you understand as much law as you do technology.

If I am going to pick and choose the laws I defend, I wouldn't be doing my duty as attorney general.

All a musician can do is to get closer to the sources of nature, and so feel that he is in communion with the natural laws.

Every unskilled illegal immigrant who enters the United States for work drives up healthcare costs for every American. And, every illegal immigrant we turn a blind eye toward weakens the rule of law our country is founded on.

How can you practice dancing in an airplane? There's a law against it.

Terrorism is not a matter that can be left to law enforcement, with its deliberative process, built-in delays, and safeguards that may let the prisoner go free on procedural grounds.

I chose to go to law school because I thought that someday, somehow I'd make a difference.

A car is like a mother-in-law - if you let it, it will rule your life.

I have done my duty by the laws of my people and I am sorry my people were led this time by men who were not soldiers and that crimes were committed of which I had no knowledge.

The death penalty, I think, is a terrible scar on American justice, especially the concept of equal justice under law, but also of due process. And it goes state by state, and it's different in different states.

I was quite convinced that I didn't want to be a lawyer. But I felt that law school would be a useful way to understand public policy and to understand business in this environment.

In such a state, humility is the virtue of men, and their only defense; to walk humbly with God, never doubting, whatever befall, that His will is good, and that His law is right.

Newman's second law: Just when things look darkest, they go black.

This seems to be the law of progress in everything we do; it moves along a spiral rather than a perpendicular; we seem to be actually going out of the way, and yet it turns out that we were really moving upward all the time.

When you expect things to happen - strangely enough - they do happen.

You can have all the gun control laws in the country, but if you don't enforce them, people are going to find a way to protect themselves. We need to recognize that bad people are doing bad things with these weapons. It's not the law-abiding citizens, it's not the person who uses it as a hobby.

When you have police officers who abuse citizens, you erode public confidence in law enforcement. That makes the job of good police officers unsafe.

If you can manipulate news, a judge can manipulate the law. A smart lawyer can keep a killer out of jail, a smart accountant can keep a thief from paying taxes, a smart reporter could ruin your reputation- unfairly.

Before, Europe was about treaties, laws and our sovereign right to govern ourselves. Now, it's about everyday lives.

Once I decide to do something, I want to win in the worst way. I will do anything within the law to win.

If Al Gore had allowed us and if the Florida Supreme Court had not intervened and rewritten the law, which theyre not supposed to do, we could have certified, which is a mere procedural action, and then after that, they could have petitioned any justice for a recount statewide with uniform standards.

We cannot build foundations of a state without rule of law.

Our government... teaches the whole people by its example. If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.

But certainly the laser proved to be what I realized it was going to be. At that moment in my life I was too ignorant in business law to be able to do it right, and if I did it over again probably the same damn thing would happen.

I have not done anything wrong. I have not broken any laws. I have not violated any IRS rules or regulations and I have not provided false information to this or any other committee.

We must not try to force him to take civilization immediately in its complete form, but under just laws, guaranteeing to Indians equal civil laws, the Indian question, a source of such dishonor to our country and of shame to true patriots, will soon be a thing of the past.

If we want to boost border security, we have to help law enforcement agencies beef up their resources to meet this demand. We cannot have one without the other.

The law is an adroit mixture of customs that are beneficial to society, and could be followed even if no law existed, and others that are of advantage to a ruling minority, but harmful to the masses of men, and can be enforced on them only by terror.

There is a point at which the law becomes immoral and unethical. That point is reached when it becomes a cloak for the cowardice that dares not stand up against blatant violations of justice.

The media has brainwashed the electorate to expect the government to do something. The best economic policy of any government is to do nothing but reduce the size of the government, reduce the size of the laws, and reduce the size of regulations.

No matter who you are or what you intend to do, you should not exceed the boundaries of the rule of law.

The backbone of our nation's domestic defense against terrorist attacks will continue to be the men and women in local law enforcement and emergency services.

I was a crown attorney in my home town in Nova Scotia, and I learned that victims of crime needed better laws to better protect them. I saw politics as a means to improve this protection for them.

I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is called a disgrace, that two are called a law firm, and that three or more become a congress.

A judge can't have any preferred outcome in any particular case. The judge's only obligation - and it's a solemn obligation - is to the rule of law.

The purpose that brought the fourteenth amendment into being was equality before the law, and equality, not separation, was written into the law.

In recent years, the choice of drugs on these reservations and throughout my district has been methamphetamines. It has destroyed the rule of law among the reservation people. It is killing our tribal youth in this country.

Mob law is the most forcible expression of an abnormal public opinion; it shows that society is rotten to the core.

I write against the religion because if women want to live like human beings, they will have to live outside the religion and Islamic law.

I would uphold the law if for no other reason but to protect myself.

I've always been driven by the concept of equal justice under the law, but only the rich can pay great sums of money for legal assistance and that puts them at an advantage over the poor.

It is always possible for the court to overreach its proper bounds and perhaps declare a lot of laws unconstitutional and frustrate the will of the majority in a way that it ought not be frustrated.

Law makes long spokes of the short stakes of men.

Who thinks the law has anything to do with justice? It's what we have because we can't have justice.

Some ISPs are blocking all BitTorrent traffic, because BitTorrent can be used to share files in a piratical way. Hollywood lobbying groups are trying to pass laws which would force ISPs to block or degrade BitTorrent traffic, too. Personally, I think this is like closing down freeways because a bank robber could use them to get away.

I've led a school whose faculty and students examine and discuss and debate every aspect of our law and legal system. And what I've learned most is that no one has a monopoly on truth or wisdom. I've learned that we make progress by listening to each other, across every apparent political or ideological divide.

The constant assumption runs throughout the law that the natural and spontaneous evolutions of habit fix the limits of right and wrong.

As a practising lawyer, I was mediocre, but I worked hard as a law officer of the state government and on the private side. After becoming a judge, I maintained a low profile in other activities and concentrated only on judicial work.

The concept that flourished during the most glorious periods of republican Rome and that appeared in the Twelve Tables of the Law as one of the first, though as yet imperfect, affirmations of the rights of man, inspired the struggle between patricians and plebeians.

I started walking at night with my sister in law which has been amazing. It really does something for you. It just kind of clears the mind, it just makes you feel better, things start to tighten a little bit.

I remember in 'Law of Desire,' where I played a homosexual, that people were more upset that I kissed a man on the mouth than I killed a man. It's interesting to see how people can pardon you for murdering a man, but they can't pardon you for kissing one.

To solve the problem of organizing world peace we must establish world law and order.

The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.

The hate and scorn showered on us Negro officers by our fellow Americans convinced me that there was no sense in my dying for a world ruled by them. I made up my mind that if I got through this war I would study law and use my time fighting for men who could not strike back.

In an instant, the law was transformed: from the last passenger on the safe-haven bandwagon to a pioneer into uncharted territory. For the first time in American history, it was not only legal to relinquish a baby; in Nebraska, it was okay to abandon any child of any age for any reason at any time - with the full protection of the law.

At first, laws evolved out of religious doctrines. It followed that they were recognized only when advantageous to those who practiced the same religion and who appeared equals under the protection of the same gods. For the members of all other cults, there was neither law nor mercy.

Our lady the Common Law is a very wise old lady though she still has something to learn in telling what she knows.

I try to live the moment and not obey laws, rules, conventions, or norms; to react to a sensation, a feeling, or an emotion. You can't program emotion.

Good Christian people, I am come hither to die, for according to the law, and by the law I am judged to die, and therefore I will speak nothing against it. I am come hither to accuse no man, nor to speak anything of that, whereof I am accused and condemned to die.

Voter caging and voter ID laws exist to disfranchise voters.

And now, dear sister, I must leave this house or the retreating army will make me a prisoner in it by filling up the road I am directed to take.

Marriage laws, the police, armies and navies are the mark of human incompetence.

My children have no prejudices at all. My own brother-in-law is Jewish!

I urge the enactment of a civil service law so explicit and so strong that no partisan official will dare evade it, basing all rewards, promotions and salaries solely on merit, on loyalty and industry in the public service.

We need to evolve a uniform law which does not leave room for any confusion and states that the minimum marriageable age for women is 18 years and that for men is 21 years. But the demand for this should come from within the community.

The proposal that men and women should be treated equally under the law is hardly a controversial concept.