Law Quotes - Page 30

• Law, the king of all mortals and immortals.

  Pindar

  Kings, Mortals

  "Gorgias" by Plato, 484b,

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• Whether a law be void for its repugnancy to the Constitution, is, at all times, a question of much delicacy, which out seldom, if ever, to be decided in the affirmative, in doubtful case. ... But it is not on slight implication and vague conjecture that the legislature is to be pronounced to have transcended its powers, and its acts to be considered as void. The opposition between the Constitution and the law should be such that the judge feels a clear and strong conviction of their incompatibility with each other.

  John Marshall

  Strong, Judging, Delicacy

  Fletcher v. Peck, 10 U.S. (6 Cranch) 87, 128, 1810.

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• Courts are the mere instruments of the law, and can will nothing. When they are said to exercise a discretion, it is a mere legal discretion, a discretion to be exercised in discerning the course prescribed by law; and, when that is discerned, it is the duty of the Court to follow it. Judicial power is never exericised for the purpose of giving effect to the will of the Judge; always for the purpose of giving effect to the will of the Legislature; or, in other words, to the will of the law.

  John Marshall

  Exercise, Judging, Giving

  Osborn v. Bank of the United States, 22 U.S. (9 Wheaton) 738, 866, 1824.

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• Every ruler must remember three things. Firstly, that he rules man; secondly, that he rules according to law, and thirdly, that he does not rule for ever.

  Agathon

  Men, Doe, Three

  "Dictionary of quotations (classical)". Book by Thomas Benfield Harbottle, p. 515, Stobaeus, Florilegium, XL, VI, 24, 1897.

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• A large number of suspects, both men and women, escaped martial law for lack of any shred of evidence against them on which a court-martial could convict. So they began setting them free in groups, according to their birth-place. But half-way, the car-load would be emptied into a ditch.

  Georges Bernanos

  Men, Birth Place, Numbers

  "A Diary of My Times". Book by Georges Bernanos, 1938.

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• A righteous government is of all the most to be wished for,Bearing of blessing and good fortune in the highest.Guided by the law of Truth, supported by dedication and zeal,It blossoms into the Best of Order, a Kingdom of Heaven!To effect this I shall work now and ever more.

  Zoroaster

  Blessing, Dedication, Government

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• To try to regulate the internal affairs of a family, the relations of love or friendship, or many other things of the same sort, by law or by the coercion of public opinion, is like trying to pull an eyelash out of a man's eye with a pair of tongs. They may put out the eye, but they will never get hold of the eyelash

  James Fitzjames Stephen

  Eye, Men, Trying

  Sir James Fitzjames Stephen (1874). “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”, p.177

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• No man-made law ever, no matter whether derived from the past or projected onto a distant, unforeseeable future, can or should ever be empowered to claim that it is greater than the Natural Law from which it stems and to which it must inevitably return in the eternal rhythm of creation and decline of all things natural.

  Wilhelm Reich

  Past, Men, Matter

  Wilhelm Reich (1960). “Selected Writings: An Introduction to Orgonomy”

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• Procedure is the bone structure of a democratic society. Our scheme of law affords great latitude for dissent and opposition. It compels wide tolerance not only for their expression but also for the organization of people and forces to bring about the acceptance of the dissenter's claim....We have alternatives to violence.

  Abe Fortas

  Acceptance, Expression, Organization

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• This Court is forever adding new stories to the temples of constitutional law, and the temples have a way of collapsing when one story too many is added.

  Robert H. Jackson

  Forever, Stories, Way

  "Douglas v. Jeannette, 319 U.S. 157, 181". Judicial opinion, 1943.

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• Of course, such judicial misconstruction theoretically can be cured by constitutional amendment. But the period of gestation of a constitutional amendment, or of any law reform, is reckoned in decades usually; in years, at least. And, after all, as the Court itself asserted in overruling the minimum-wage cases, it may not be the Constitution that was at fault.

  Robert H. Jackson

  Gestation Period, Years, Minimum Wage

  "The Struggle for Judicial Supremacy: A Study in Crisis in American Power Politics". Book by Robert H. Jackson, p. 297, 1941.

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• All my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Cosmos, Fundamentals, Emotion

  H. P. Lovecraft (2013). “The Classic Horror Stories”, p.453, OUP Oxford

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• Time, space, and natural law hold for me suggestions of intolerable bondage, and I can form no picture of emotional satisfaction which does not involve their defeat - especially the defeat of time, so that one may merge oneself with the whole historic stream and be wholly emancipated from the transient and the ephemeral.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Emotional, Space, Suggestions

  Letter to August Derleth (21 November 1930), in "Selected Letters III, 1929-1931" edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, (p. 220), 1971.

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• I recognise a distinction between dream life and real life, between appearances and actualities. I confess to an over-powering desire to know whether I am asleep or awake--whether the environment and laws which affect me are external and permanent, or the transitory products of my own brain.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Dream, Real, Brain

  H. P. Lovecraft (2010). “Against Religion: The Atheist Writings of H.P. Lovecraft”, p.17, Lulu.com

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• It must be remembered that there is no real reason to expect anything in particular from mankind; good and evil are local expedients - or their lack - and not in any sense cosmic truths or laws.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Real, Evil, Reason

  "Collected Essays, Volume 5: Philosophy" edited by S. T. Joshi, (p. 70), 2006.

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• No one ever wrote a story yet without some real emotional drive behind it--and I have not that drive except where violations of the natural order ... defiances and evasions of time, space, and cosmic law ... are concerned.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Real, Emotional, Order

  H. P. Lovecraft, August Derleth, James Turner (1976). “Selected Letters 1934-1937”, Arkham House Publishers

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• The inscrutable laws of sex have so arranged that even a timid woman is not afraid of a fierce and haughty man.

  Bram Stoker

  Sex, Men, Fierce

  Bram Stoker, Richard Dalby, Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, S. T. Joshi (1997). “Best Ghost and Horror Stories”, p.133, Courier Corporation

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• A theory deeply etched in our law [is that] a free society prefers to punish the few who abuse the rights of free speech after they break the law rather than to throttle them and all others beforehand.

  Clarence Thomas

  Rights, Justice, Black

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• And last of all we have the secondary forms of crystals bursting in upon us, and sparkling in the rigidity of mathematical necessity and telling us, neither of harmony of design, usefulness or moral significance, nothing but spherical trigonometry and Napier's analogies. It is because we have blindly excluded the lessons of these angular bodies from the domain of human knowledge that we are still in doubt about the great doctrine that the only laws of matter are those which our minds must fabricate, and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter.

  James Clerk Maxwell

  Design, Doubt, Mind

  James Clerk Maxwell (1990). “The Scientific Letters and Papers of James Clerk Maxwell: 1846-1862”, p.383, CUP Archive

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• I just want people who are qualified, I want them to believe in the Constitution of the United States of America. So yep, I don't have a problem with appointing an openly gay person. Because they're not going to try to put sharia law in our laws.

  Herman Cain

  Believe, Gay, America

  "Cain Says He Would Be Ok With Appointing Gay Cabinet Members Because They Wouldn’t Impose Sharia Law". thinkprogress.org. June 06, 2011.

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• We need to make sure that the laws we're passing are protecting people. And we should not be voting against something that makes progress just because it doesn't make as much progress as we'd like to see made. As much as I might like to see any number of issues progress in larger steps, I understand that some of these things happen in smaller steps. And so for that reason, progress is progress. And success is success.

  Clay Aiken

  Numbers, Issues, People

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• I'm trying to bring danger back in to rock 'n' roll and there are no limits and no laws and I break down every barrier put in front of me till the day I die.

  GG Allin

  Rocks, Trying, Limits

  "Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies". Documentary, Biography, Music, 1993.

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• Do not allow your sorrow or your rage to become hostility toward people on the basis of their ethnicity or their religious views. That is unacceptable; it is out of bounds, and if you break the law, we will prosecute you for it.

  John Ashcroft

  Religious, Views, Ethnicity

  John Ashcroft (2006). “Never Again: Securing America and Restoring Justice”, p.113, Hachette UK

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• Our country as a whole, no less than the Hastings College of Law, values tolerance, cooperation, learning, and the amicable resolution of conflicts. But we seek to achieve those goals through "[a] confident pluralism that conduces to civil peace and advances democratic consensus-building," not by abridging First Amendment rights.

  Samuel Alito

  Country, College, Rights

  Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, 130 S. Ct. 2971, 3015-16, 2010.

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• Von Neumann languages do not have useful properties for reasoning about programs. Axiomatic and denotational semantics are precise tools for describing and understanding conventional programs, but they only talk about them and cannot alter their ungainly properties. Unlike von Neumann languages, the language of ordinary algebra is suitable both for stating its laws and for transforming an equation into its solution, all within the "language."

  John Backus

  Understanding, Ordinary, Tools

  "Can Programming Be Liberated From the von Neumann Style?". John Backus' 1977 Turing Award lecture, published in "Communications of the ACM", Volume 21, No. 8 (pp. 639-640), August 1978.

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