Law Quotes

The United States is a nation of laws:  badly written and randomly enforced.  ~ Frank Zappa


The greater the number of laws and enactments, the more thieves and robbers there will be.  ~ Lao-tzu


People say law but they mean wealth.  ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson


The law is reason, free from passion.  ~ Aristotle


The problem with living outside the law is that you no longer have its protection.  ~ Truman Capote


The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly.  ~ Abraham Lincoln


A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.  ~ H.L. Mencken


Law represents the effort of man to organize society; governments, the efforts of selfishness to overthrow liberty.  ~ Henry Ward Beecher


The people must fight on behalf of the law as though for the city wall.  ~ Heraclitus


To some lawyers, all facts are created equal.  ~ Felix Frankfurter


It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.  ~ Martin Luther King Jr.


If you have ten thousand regulations you destroy all respect for the law.  ~ Winston S. Churchill


99% of lawyers give the rest a bad name.  ~ Steven Wright


Laws alone can not secure freedom of expression; in order that every man present his views without penalty there must be spirit of tolerance in the entire population.  ~ Albert Einstein


If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers.  ~ Charles Dickens


The United States is the greatest law factory the world has ever known.  ~ Charles Evans Hughes


Law and order is one of the steps taken to maintain injustice.  ~ Edward Bond


No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong is what is against it.  ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson


A man may as well open an oyster without a knife, as a lawyer's mouth without a fee.  ~ Barten Holyday


When you have no basis for an arguement, abuse the plaintiff.  ~ Cicero


The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.  ~ Tacitus


Law never made men a whit more just.  ~ Henry David Thoreau


For certain people, after fifty, litigation takes the place of sex.  ~ Gore vidal


Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it.  ~ Howard Zinn


One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.  ~ Martin Luther King Jr.


When you break the big laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.  ~ G.K. Chesterton


For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king and there ought to be no other.  ~ Thomas Paine


Laws are silent in times of war.  ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero


Lawyer – One skilled in the circumvention of the law.  ~ Ambrose Bierce


May you have a lawsuit in which you know you are in the right.  ~ Gypsy curse


At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.  ~ Aristotle


When men are pure, laws are useless; when men are corrupt, laws are broken.  ~ Benamin Disraeli


Appeal in law: to put the dice into the box for another draw.  ~ Ambrose Bierce


He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides.  ~ Charles Lamb


Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.  ~ Edmund Burke


Even when laws have been written down, they ought not always to remain unaltered.  ~ Aristotle


Divorce is a game played by lawyers.  ~ Cary Grant


A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats.  ~ Benjamin Franklin


We cannot expect people to have respect for law and order until we teach respect to those we have entrusted to enforce those laws.  ~ Hunter S. Thompson


I was never ruined but twice: once when I lost a lawsuit, and once when I won one.  ~ Voltaire


The more laws, the more offenders.  ~ Thomas Fuller


In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm and three or more is a congress.  ~ John Adams


I am increasingly persuaded that the earth belongs exclusively to the living and that one generation has no more right to bind another to it's laws and judgments than one independent nation has the right to command another.  ~ Thomas Jefferson


We do not need to get good laws to restrain bad people. We need to get good people to restrain us from bad laws.  ~ G.K. Chesterton


Justice is incidental to law and order.  ~ John Edgar Hoover


Almost without fail, lawsuits are about revenge.  ~ Liz Smith


Laws are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made.  ~ Otto von Bismarck


An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so.  ~ Mahatma Gandhi


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


The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.  ~ Anatole France


Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all his laws.  ~ John Adams


A nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its laws made by cowards and its wars fought by fools.  ~ Thucydides


The houses of lawyers are roofed with the skins of litigants.   ~ Welsh Proverb


The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.  ~ Cornelius Tacitus


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


Please remember that law and sense are not always the same.  ~ Jawaharlal Nehru


The real reason that we can’t have the Ten Commandments in a courthouse: You cannot post “Thou shalt not steal,” “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” and “Thou shalt not lie” in a building full of lawyers, judges, and politicians. It creates a hostile work environment.  ~ George Carlin


It ain't no sin if you crack a few laws now and then, just so long as you don't break any.  ~ Mae West


A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.  ~ Robert Frost


Our civilization is shifting from science and technology to rhetoric and litigation.  ~ Mason Cooley


I decided law was the exact opposite of sex; even when it was good, it was lousy.  ~ Mortimer Zuckerman


Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.  ~ Honoré de Balzac