Quotes on Law

The purpose of the law is not to prevent a future offense, but to punish the one actually committed.

The guilty are allowed, by human laws, bloody as they are, to speak in their own defence before they are condemned.

Those who lapse from the Gospel to the Law are no better off than those who lapse from grace to idolatry.

There is no country in the world in which everything can be provided for by the laws, or in which political institutions can prove a substitute for common sense and public morality.

Were the judgments of mankind correct, custom would be regulated by the good. But it is often far otherwise in point of fact; for, whatever the many are seen to do, forthwith obtains the force of custom. But human affairs have scarcely ever been so happily constituted as that the better course pleased the greater number. Hence the private vices of the multitude have generally resulted in public error, or rather that common consent in vice which these worthy men would have to be law.

The laws of the colors are unutterably beautiful, just because they are not accidental.

The first law for the historian is that he shall never dare utter an untruth. The second is that he shall suppress nothing that is true. Moreover, there shall be no suspicion of partiality in his writing, or of malice.

One of the strange laws of the contemplative life is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves. Or until life solves them for you.

It requires but a very small glance of thought to perceive, that although laws made in one generation often continue in force through succeeding generations, yet that they continue to derive their force from the consent of the living. A law not repealed continues in force, not because it cannot be repealed, but because it is not repealed; and the non repealing passes for consent.

The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.

But assuming the same premises, to wit, that all men are equal by the law of nature and of nations, the right of property in slaves falls to the ground; for one who is equal to another cannot be the owner or property of that other.

To succeed in the other trades, capacity must be shown; in the law, concealment of it will do.

It would be better to have no laws at all, than to have too many.

The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science that smiles in your face while it picks your pocket.

When dictators and tyrants seek to destroy the freedoms of men, their first target is the legal profession and through it the rule of law.

CONGRESS, n. A body of men who meet to repeal laws.

Purity and stillness give the correct law to all under heaven.

OATH, n. In law, a solemn appeal to the Deity, made binding upon the conscience by a penalty for perjury.

True freedom requires the rule of law and justice, and a judicial system in which the rights of some are not secured by the denial of rights to others.

If man asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous.

Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice. Society is a living organism and must obey the laws of life, not of mechanics; it must develop. All that progressives ask or desire is permission-in an era when 'development,' 'evolution,' is the scientific word-to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine.