Quotes on Law

Our belief in any particular natural law cannot have a safer basis than our unsuccessful critical attempts to refute it.

However much we talk of the inexorable laws governing the life of individuals and of societies, we remain at the bottom convinced that in human affairs everything in more or less fortuitous. We do not even believe in the inevitability of our own death. Hence the difficulty of deciphering the present, of detecting the seeds of things to come as they germinate before our eyes. We are not attuned to seeing the inevitable.

I saw in the whole Christian world a license of fighting at which even barbarous nations might blush. Wars were begun on trifling pretexts or none at all, and carried on without any reference of law, Divine or human.

We have no right to assume that any physical laws exist, or if they have existed up until now, that they will continue to exist in a similar manner in the future.

Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who posses it; and this I know, my lords: that where law ends, tyranny begins.

If people live in constant fear of death, and if breaking the law is punished by death, then who would dare?

It is a law of human nature that in victory even the coward may boast of his prowess, while defeat injures the reputation even of the brave.

Lawyers know life practically. A bookish man should always have them to converse with.

The latest authors, like the most ancient, strove to subordinate the phenomena of nature to the laws of mathematics.

The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.

Climbing is not a battle with the elements, nor against the law of gravity. It's a battle against oneself.

The Constitution and the laws are supreme and the Union indissoluble.

The laws of nature are constructed in such a way as to make the universe as interesting as possible.

Time is in the mind, space is in the mind. The law of cause and effect is also a way of thinking. In reality all is here and now and all is one. Multiplicity and diversity are in the mind only.

The law must be stable, but it must not stand still.

Life is not at all what you might think it to be_x000D_ _x000D_ A simple tale where each thing has its history_x000D_ _x000D_ It's much more than its scuffle and anything goes_x000D_ _x000D_ Both evil and good, subject to the same laws.

My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.

If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.

The law has been perverted, and the powers of the state have become perverted along with it. The law has not only been turned from its proper function, but made to follow an entirely contrary purpose. The law has become a tool for every kind of greed. Instead of preventing crime, the law itself is guilty of the abuses it is supposed to punish. If this is true, it is a serious matter, and moral duty requires me to call the attention of my fellow-citizens to it.

Successful crime is dignified with the name of virtue; the good become the slaves of the wicked; might makes right; fear silences the power of the law.

It is the invariable habit of bureaucracies, at all times and everywhere, to assume...that every citizen is a criminal. Their one apparent purpose, pursued with a relentless and furious diligence, is to convert the assumption into a fact. They hunt endlessly for proofs, and, when proofs are lacking, for mere suspicions. The moment they become aware of a definite citizen, John Doe, seeking what is his right under the law, they begin searching feverishly for an excuse for withholding it from him.