Law Quotes

While the law may not change the hearts of men, it can and it does change the habits of men. And when you begin to change the habits of men, pretty soon the attitudes will be changed.

Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice, and when they fail in this purpose, they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.

A Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged could mark the rise of a new era, in which the full resources of the society would be used to attack the tenacious poverty which so paradoxically exists in the midst of plenty.

Since the institution of slavery was so important to the economic development of America, it had a profound impact in shaping the social-political-legal structure of the nation. Land and slaves were the chief forms of private property, property was wealth and the voice of wealth made the law and determined politics.

Would the slower processes of legislation and law enforcement ultimately have accomplished greater results more painlessly? Demonstrations, experience has shown, are part of the process of stimulating legislation and law enforcement. The federal government reacts to events more quickly when a situation of conflict cries out for its intervention.

Just as the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 proclaimed Negro suffrage, only to permit its de facto withdrawal in half the nation, so in 1965 the Voting Rights Law was passed and then permitted to languish with only fractional and halfhearted implementation.

If you make 10,000 regulations you destroy all respect for the law.

And wherever men are fighting against barbarism, tyranny, and massacre, for freedom, law, and honour, let them remember that the fame of their deeds, even though they themselves be exterminated, may perhaps be celebrated as long as the world rolls round.

The jury system has come to stand for all we mean by English justice. The scrutiny of 12 honest jurors provides defendants and plaintiffs alike a safeguard from arbitrary perversion of the law.

Here is a law which is above the King and which even he must not break. This reaffirmation of a supreme law and its expression in a general charter is the great work of Magna Carta; and this alone justifies the respect in which men have held it.

We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.

Bloodshed, gentlemen, no doubt is lamentable. I have seen some of it--more perhaps than many of those who talk about it with such levity. But there are worse things than bloodshed, even on an extreme scale. . . . The trampling down of law and order which, under the conditions of a civilised state, assure life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--all this would be worse than bloodshed.

Harsh laws are at times better than no laws at all.

Until the 'Stand Your Ground' law is abolished in Florida, I will never perform there again.

There's this thing called compulsory licensing law that allows artists through the record companies to take your music at will without your permission.

One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.

Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.

There are laws to protect the freedom of the press's speech, but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press.

Religion and law try to escape from criticism, religion by saying that it is divine and law by showing that it is powerful.

Writing laws is easy, but governing is difficult.