Law Quotes - Page 24

• Lawyers are shy of meddling with the Law on their own account: knowing it to be an edged tool of uncertain application, very expensive in the working, and rather remarkable for its properties of close shaving than for its always shaving the right person.

  Charles Dickens

  Knowing, Shaving, Shy

  Charles Dickens (1848). “The Old Curiosity Shop ... With a Frontispiece. From a Painting by Geo. Cattermole, Etc”, p.168

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• I agree that marijuana laws are overdue for an overhaul. I also favor the medical use of marijuana -- if it's prescribed by a physician. I cannot understand why the federal government should interfere with the doctor-patient relationship, nor why it would ignore the will of a majority of voters who have legally approved such legislation.

  Abigail Van Buren

  Marijuana, Doctors, Government

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• The ever-present impulse is to push against restriction and, in so doing, to feel intolerably hemmed in. Thus in practice, every liberation increases the sense of oppression. Nor is the paradox merely in the mind: the laws enacted to secure the rights of every person and group, by creating protective boundaries, create new barriers.

  Jacques Barzun

  Rights, Practice, Creating

  "The Culture We Deserve" by Jacques Barzun, Wesleyan University Press, (p. 97), 1989.

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• Next to the ministry I know of no more noble profession than the law. The object aimed at is justice, equal and exact, and if it does not reach that end at once it is because the stream is diverted by selfishness or checked by ignorance. Its principles ennoble and its practice elevates.

  William Jennings Bryan

  Ignorance, Practice, Justice

  William Jennings Bryan, Mary Baird Bryan (1900). “The Life and Speeches of Hon. Wm. Jennings Bryan”

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• I have been told by an eminent bookseller, that in no branch of his business , after tracts of popular devotion, were so many books as those on the law exported to the Plantations .

  Edmund Burke

  Book, Branches, Devotion

  Edmund Burke (1777). “The Political Tracts and Speeches of Edmund Burke”, p.382

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• Baseball has the largest library of law and love and custom and ritual, and therefore, in a nation that fundamentally believes it is a nation under law, well, baseball is America's most privileged version of the level field.

  A. Bartlett Giamatti

  Baseball, Believe, America

  Quoted in Sports Illustrated, 17 Apr. 1989

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• I see nothing quite conclusive in the art of temporal government, But violence, duplicity and frequent malversation. King rules or barons rule: The strong man strongly and the weak man by caprice. They have but one law, to seize the power and keep it.

  Samuel Smiles

  Art, Strong, Kings

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• Whenever the law gets its hands on you, those who use the law to their own advantage will also turn it against you. Don't put your trust in the laws of men, Alvin. They were designed by strong men to improve their power over weaker ones.

  Orson Scott Card

  Strong, Men, Hands

  Orson Scott Card (1996). “Alvin Journeyman: The Tales of Alvin Maker”, p.233, Macmillan

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• There is simply no room left for 'freedom from the tyranny of government' since city dwellers depend on it for food, power, water, transportation, protection, and welfare. Your right to live where you want, with companions of your choosing, under laws to which you agree, died in the eighteenth century with Captain Mission. Only a miracle or a disaster could restore it.

  William S. Burroughs

  Government, Cities, Water

  William S. Burroughs (2007). “Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader”, p.416, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• Use law and physic only for necessity; they that use them otherwise abuse themselves unto weak bodies, and light purses; they are good remedies, bad businesses, and worse recreations.

  Francis Quarles

  Light, Abuse, Body

  Francis Quarles (1844). “Enchiridion Institutions, Essays and Maxims, political, moral & divine. Divided into four centuries. By Francis Quarles”, p.60

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• The criminal law has, from the point of view of thwarted virtue, the merit of allowing an outlet for those impulses of aggression which cowardice, disguised as morality, restrains in their more spontaneous forms. War has the same merit. You must not kill you neighbor, whom perhaps you genuinely hate, but by a little propaganda this hate can be transferred to some foreign nation, against whom all your murderous impulses become patriotic heroism.

  Bertrand Russell

  Hate, War, Patriotic

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• Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank, The army of unalterable law.

  George Meredith

  Army, Track, Ancient

  'Lucifer in Starlight'

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• If nature does not ratify law, then all the virtues may lose their sway.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Doe, May, Virtue

  Marcus Tullius Cicero, Charles Duke Yonge (1853). “The Treatises of M.T. Cicero: On the Nature of the Gods; On Divination; On Fate; On the Republic; On the Laws; and On Standing for the Consulship”, p.417, London : H.G. Bohn

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• What we are accustomed to decry as great social evils, will, for the most part, be found to be only the out-growth of our own perverted life; and though we may endeavor to cut them down and extirpate them by means of law, they will only spring up again with fresh luxuriance in some other form, unless the conditions of human life and character are radically improved.

  Samuel Smiles

  Spring, Character, Mean

  Samuel Smiles (2014). “Self-Help”, p.2, Cambridge University Press

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• The young watch television twenty-four hours a day, they don't read and they rarely listen. This incessant bombardment of images has developed a hypertrophied eye condition that's turning them into a race of mutants. They should pass a law for a total reeducation of the young, making children visit the Galleria Borghese on a daily basis.

  Federico Fellini

  Children, Eye, Race

  "I'm a Born Liar: A Fellini Lexicon". Book edited by Damian Pettigrew, December 1, 2003.

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• We can use laws to prosecute and make people think twice before going to do something like blowing up Buddhas and other things.

  Robert M. Edsel

  Thinking, People, Use

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

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• Give me the judgment of balanced minds in preference to laws every time. Codes and manuals create patterned behavior. All patterned behavior tends to go unquestioned, gathering destructive momentum.

  Frank Herbert

  Giving, Mind, Gathering

  Frank Herbert (1987). “Chapterhouse: Dune”, p.218, Penguin

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• I am a thing not new, I am as old As human nature. I am that which lurks, Ready to spring whenever a bar is loosed; The ancient trait which fights incessantly Against restraint, balks at the upward climb; The weight forever seeking to obey The law of downward pull; and I am more: The bitter fruit am I of planted seed; The resultant, the inevitable end Of evil forces and the powers of wrong.

  James Weldon Johnson

  Spring, Fighting, Evil

  James Weldon Johnson, “Brothers”

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• Magic is that which it is; it is by itself, like the mathematics; for it is the exact and absolute science of Nature and its laws . Magic is the science of the Ancient Magi: and the Christian religion, which has imposed silence on the lying oracles, and put an end to the prestiges of the false Gods , itself reveres those Magi who came from the East, guided by a Star , to adore the Saviour of the world in His cradle.

  Albert Pike

  Christian, Stars, Lying

  Albert Pike (2013). “Morals and Dogma”, p.751, Simon and Schuster

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• Knowing that all things contrary to God's laws are transient, let us avoid despair and radiate hope for a warless world.

  Peace Pilgrim

  Knowing, Despair, World

  Peace Pilgrim (1992). “Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words”, p.99, Friends of Peace PIlgrim

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• No law can possibly meet the convenience of every one: we must be satisfied if it be beneficial on the whole and to the majority.

  Livy

  Majority, Convenience, Satisfied

  "History of Rome". Book by Livy. Book XXXIV, section 3,

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• Symons remarked that the most common and unhelpful illusion plaguing those who came to see him was the idea that they ought somehow, in the normal course of events, to have intuited long before they had finished their degrees, started families, bought houses and risen to the top of law firms - what they should properly be doing with their lives. They were tormented by a residual notion of having through some error or stupidity on their part missed out on their true calling.

  Alain de Botton

  Ideas, Errors, Long

  "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work". Book by Alain de Botton, 2009.

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• Thanks to the scientific method, most people in "developed" countries have an outlook of mild deism. We assume things like weather and disease operate according to fixed natural laws. Every so often, though, problems impinge on us so directly that we stretch beyond that mildly deistic stance and ask God to intervene. When a drought drags on too long, we pray for rain. When a young mother gets a diagnosis of cervical cancer, we solicit prayers for her healing. We beseech God as if trying to talk God into something God otherwise might not want to do.

  Philip Yancey

  Country, Mother, Prayer

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• I would rather quit public life at seventy, and quit it forever, than to retain public life at a sacrifice to my own self-respect. I will not vote for any law which will make fair for me and foul for another. The blacklist is the most cruel form of oppression ever devised by man for the infliction of suffering upon his weaker fellows.

  Joseph Gurney Cannon

  Sacrifice, Men, Self

  "Uncle Joe Cannon" by L. White Busby, (p. 278), 1927.

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• I did a lot of theater in school. I thought maybe I wanted to go to law school or be a judge or a politician. And then I just kind of got smitten by the process of rehearsal and working with other actors and those kinds of challenges. And then comedy.

  Rashida Jones

  School, Judging, Challenges

  "Rashida Jones and Chris Pratt Talk Parks and Recreation". Interview with Brian Gallagher, www.movieweb.com. October 30, 2009.

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