Famous Quotes & Sayings

Samuel Johnson

For gold the hireling judge distorts the laws.

Samuel Johnson

It is one of the maxims of the civil law, that definitions are hazardous.

Samuel Johnson

The accidental prescriptions of authority, when time has procured them veneration, are often confounded with the laws of nature, and those rules are supposed coeval with reason, of which the first rise cannot be discovered.

Sarah Orne Jewett

we have these instincts which defy all our wisdom and for which we never can frame any laws. ... They are powers which are imperfectly developed in this life, but one cannot help the thought that the mystery of this world may be the commonplace of the next.

Vittorio Alfieri

Where there are laws, he who has not broken them need not tremble.

William Howard Taft

One of the reforms to be carried out during the incoming administration is a change in our monetary and banking laws, so as to secure greater elasticity in the forms of currency available for trade and to prevent the limitations of law from operating to increase the embarrassment of a financial panic.

William Howard Taft

We have a government of limited power under the Constitution, and we have got to work out our problems on the basis of law.

William Howard Taft

Action for which I become responsible, or for which my administration becomes responsible, shall be within the law.

William Howard Taft

We live in a stage of politics, where legislators seem to regard the passage of laws as much more important than the results of their enforcement.

Walter Lippmann

For in the absence of debate unrestricted utterance leads to the degradation of opinion. By a kind of Greshams law the more rational is overcome by the less rational, and the opinions that will prevail will be those which are held most ardently by those with the most passionate will. For that reason the freedom to speak can never be maintained merely by objecting to interference with the liberty of the press, of printing, of broadcasting, of the screen. It can be maintained only by promoting debate.

Walter Lippmann

There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil.

Voltaire

Why are the Jews hated? It is the inevitable result of their laws; they either have to conquer everybody or be hated by the whole human race...

Voltaire

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

Voltaire

Tyrants have always some slight shade of virtue; they support the laws before destroying them.

Voltaire

What is toleration? It is the prerogative of humanity. We are all steeped in weaknesses and errors: Let us forgive one another's follies, it is the first law of nature.

Voltaire

The opinion of all lawyers, the unanimous cry of the nation, and the good of the state, are in themselves a law.

Voltaire

If you want good laws, burn those you have and make new ones.

Voltaire

Let all the laws be clear, uniform and precise for interpreting laws is almost always to corrupt them.

William Ernest Hocking

The only thing that can set aside a law as wrong is a better law, or an idea of a better law. And the only thing that an give a law the quality of better or worse is the concrete result which it promotes or fails to promote.

William Ernest Hocking

Principle II:;: The presumptions of the law are creative presumptions:;: they are aimed at conditions to be brought about, and only for that reason ignore conditions which exist.

William Feather

Always remember that there is a law of compensation which operates just as infallibly as gravitation, and that victory goes at last where it ought to, and that this is just as true of individuals as of nations.

William Pitt

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.

William Rehnquist

It is always possible for the court to overreach its proper bounds and perhaps declare a lot of laws unconstitutional and frustrate the will of the majority in a way that it ought not be frustrated.

William Rehnquist

What many of those who oppose the use of juries in civil trials seem to ignore is that the founders of our Nation considered the right of trial by jury in civil cases an important bulwark against tyranny and corruption, a safeguard too precious to be left to the whim of the sovereign, or, it might be added, to that of the judiciary.

William Powell

Have you noticed that the people who actually make the laws, the people in power, never make laws for themselves?

William Randolph Hearst

British Conservatives base their entire approach to politics on the rule of law, and rightly so.

William Lloyd Garrison

That which is not just is not law.

William Least Heat-Moon

Life doesn't happen along interstates. It's against the law.

William Brewster

Generally, elders are among the more reverent members of the Church, but there is no law prescribing their age.

William C. Bryant

Can anything be imagined more abhorrent to every sentiment of generosity and justice, than the law which arms the rich with the legal right to fix, by assize, the wages of the poor? If this is not slavery, we have forgotten its definition. Strike the right of associating for the sale of labor from the privileges of a freeman, and you may as well bind him to a master, or ascribe him to the soil.

Wilhelm Wundt

Some say that everything that is called a psychical law is nothing but the psychological reflex of physical combinations, which is made up of sensations joined to certain central cerebral processes... It is contradicted by the fact of consciousness itself, which cannot possibly be derived from any physical qualities of material molecules or atoms.

Wilkie Collins

The law will argue any thing, with any body who will pay the law for the use of its brains and its time.

Wilhelm Reich

I observe to the letter all laws that make sense but combat those that are obsolete or absurd.