Quotes about law

"The rules!" shouted Ralph, "you're breaking the rules!"

"Who cares?"

Ralph summoned his wits.

"Because the rules are the only thing we've got!"

But Jack was shouting against him.

"Bollocks to the rules! We're strong — we hunt! If there's a beast, we'll hunt it down! We'll close in and beat and beat and beat — !"

In the same way crimes have increased laws, errors have increased explanations.

… we've got so many laws you can't breathe without breaking something.

There were rules in the monastery, but the Master always warned against the tyranny of the law.

"Obedience keeps the rules," he would say. "Love knows when to break them."

“Besides,” Amy said, “since when have treaties ever stopped governments from doing what they wanted to do?”

Money equals power; power makes the law; and law makes government.

All true enlightenment is illegal at first, within its context.

Any decent kind of world, you wouldn't need all these rules.

Oh, Wally, never go to law for simple vengeance; that's not what law is for. Redress, yes; vengeance, no.

They have no lawyers among them, for they consider them as a sort of people whose profession it is to disguise matters and to wrest the laws, and, therefore, they think it is much better that every man should plead his own cause, and trust it to the judge, as in other places the client trusts it to a counsellor; by this means they both cut off many delays and find out truth more certainly; for after the parties have laid open the merits of the cause, without those artifices which lawyers are apt to suggest, the judge examines the whole matter, and supports the simplicity of such well-meaning persons, whom otherwise crafty men would be sure to run down; and thus they avoid those evils which appear very remarkably among all those nations that labour under a vast load of laws. Every one of them is skilled in their law; for, as it is a very short study, so the plainest meaning of which words are capable is always the sense of their laws; and they argue thus: all laws are promulgated for this end, that every man may know his duty; and, therefore, the plainest and most obvious sense of the words is that which ought to be put upon them, since a more refined exposition cannot be easily comprehended, and would only serve to make the laws become useless to the greater part of mankind, and especially to those who need most the direction of them; for it is all one not to make a law at all or to couch it in such terms that, without a quick apprehension and much study, a man cannot find out the true meaning of it, since the generality of mankind are both so dull, and so much employed in their several trades, that they have neither the leisure nor the capacity requisite for such an inquiry.

It seems to me that any law that is not enforced and can’t be enforced weakens all other laws.

Respect for laws is a pragmatic matter. Women know this instinctively; that’s why they are all smugglers. Men often believe — or pretend — that the “Law” is something sacred, or at least a science — an unfounded assumption very convenient to governments.