This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"A good custom is surer than law." - Euripedes NULL
"There is nothing more hostile to a city than a tyrant, under whom in the first and chiefest place, there are not laws in common, but one man, keeping the law himself to himself, has the sway and this is no longer equal." - Euripedes NULL
"Law never does anything constructive. We have had enough of legislators promising to do that which laws can not do." - Henry Ford
"Retribution is one of the grand principles in the divine administration of human affairs; a requital is imperceptible only to the willfully unobservant. There is everywhere the working of the everlasting law of requital; man always gets as he gives." - James "Jim" L. Foster
"If facts are changing, law cannot be static." - Felix Frankfurter
"Necessity has no law." - Benjamin Franklin
"When the law contradicts what most people regard as moral and proper, they will break the law - whether the law is enacted in the name of a noble ideal... or in the naked interest of one group at the expense of another. Only fear of punishment, not a sense of justice and morality, will lead people to obey the law." -
"We all know here that the law is the most powerful of schools for the imagination. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth." - Hippolyte Jean Giraudoux
"Law is mighty, necessity is mightier." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Remember you have not a sinew whose law of strength is not action; not a faculty of body, mind, or soul, whose law of improvement is not energy." - Edwin Bradford Hall
"Society has only one law, and that is custom. Even religion is socially powerful only so far as it has custom on its side." - Philip G. Hamerton, fully Philip Gilbert Hamerton
"Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women, when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lives there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it. And what is this liberty which must live in the heart of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to so as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow." -
"As is the inner, so is the outer; as is the great, so is the small; as it is above, so it is below; there is but One Life and Law: and he that worketh it is ONE. Nothing is inner, nothing is outer; nothing is great, nothing is small; nothing is high, nothing is low, in the Divine Economy." - Hermetica NULL
"Love is represented as the fulfilling of the law, a creature’s perfection. All other graces, all divine dispensations contribute to this, and are lost in it as in a heaven. It expels the dross of our nature; it overcomes sorrow; it is the full joy of our Lord." - Richard Hooker
"Of law there can be no less acknowledged than that her seat is thy bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world; all things do her homage, the very least as feeling her care; and the greatest as not exempted from her power; both angels and men, and creatures of what condition soever, though each in different sort and manner, yet all with uniform consent admiring her as the mother of their peace and joy." - Richard Hooker
"Of the systems above us, angelic and seraphic, we know little; but we see one law, simple, efficient, and comprehensive as that of gravitation - the law of love, extending its sway over the whole of God’s dominions, living where He lives, embracing every moral movement in its ;universal authority, and producing the same harmony, where it is obeyed as we observe in the movements of nature." -
"There are not enough jails, nor enough policemen, not enough courts to enforce a law not supported by the people." - Hubert Humphrey, fully Hubert Horatio Humphrey
"The law of diminishing returns holds good in almost every part of our human universe." - Aldous Leonard Huxley
"Ignorance of the law is no excuse in any country. If it were, the laws would lose their effect, because it can be always pretended." - Thomas Jefferson
"The Family of Man is more than three billion strong. It lives in more than one hundred nations. Most of its members are not white. Most of them are not Christians. Most of them know nothing about free enterprise, of due process of law or the Australian ballot." - John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy
"I believe that the fewer the laws in a home the better; but there is one law which should be as plainly understood as the shining of the sun is visible at noonday, and that is, implicit and instantaneous obedience from the child to the parent, not only for the peace of the home, but for the highest good of the child." - Abbott Elliot Kittredge
"A good judge decides fairly, preferring equity to strict law." - Law Maxim NULL
"All men are equal before the natural law." - Law Maxim NULL
"Ancient custom is always held of regarded as law." - Law Maxim NULL
"Custom is held to be as a law." - Law Maxim NULL
"In all things, but particularly in the law, there is equity." - Law Maxim NULL
"Let every man remember that to violate the law is to trample on the blood of his father, and to tear the charter of his own and his children's liberty." - Abraham Lincoln
"The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly." - Abraham Lincoln
"Repentance is a hearty sorrow for our past misdeeds, and is a sincere resolution and endeavor, to the utmost of our power, to conform all our actions to the law of God. It does not consist in one single act of sorrow, but in doing works meet for repentance; in a sincere obedience to the law of Christ for the remainder of our lives." - John Locke
"Wherever law ends, tyranny begins." - John Locke
"When we say that law ‘embodies’ values we are talking metaphorically. What does it mean? Values are only ‘embodied’ in law in the sense that and to the extent that human beings approve of the laws they have because of the state of affairs they are supposed to secure, being states of affairs which are on some ground deemed just or otherwise good. This need not be articulated at all." - Neil MacCormick, Sir Donald Neil MacCormick
"The fundamental rights, like the right to existence and life; the right to personal freedom or to conduct one’s own life as master of oneself and of one’s acts, responsible for them before God and the law of the community; the right to the pursuit of the perfection of moral and rational human life; the right to keep one’s body whole; the right to private ownership of material goods, which is a safeguard of the liberties of the individual; the right to marry according to one’s choice and to raise a family which will be assured of the liberties due it; the right of association, the respect for human dignity in each individual, whether or not he represents an economic value for society - all these rights are rooted in the vocation of the person (a spiritual and free agent) to the order of absolute values and to a destiny superior to time." - Jacques Maritain
"A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law." - John Marshall
"To love our parents is the first law of nature." - Valerius Maximus
"As ages roll on there is doubtless a progression in human nature. The intellectual comes to rule the physical, and the moral claims to subordinate both. It is no longer strength of body that prevails, but strength of mind; while the law of God proclaims itself superior to both." - James McCosh
"There are bad examples which are worse than crimes; and more states have perished from the violation of morality than from the violation of law." - Baron de Montesquieu, fully Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu
"There is no more cruel tyranny than that which is exercised under cover of the law, and with the colors of justice." - Baron de Montesquieu, fully Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu
"Evolution is not a force but a process, not a cause but a law." - John Morley, 1st Viscount Morely of Blackburn, Lord Morley
"Every thing existing on the physical plain is an exteriorization of a thought which must be balanced through the one who issued the thought and in accordance with that one's responsibility at the conjunction of time, condition and place. This law of thought is Destiny. Thinking is the basic factor in shaping human destiny. The machinery of the law is nature. The purpose of the universe is to make all units of matter conscious of progressively higher degrees." - Harold W. Percival, fully Sir Harold Waldwin Percival
"Those who live in accordance with law are free; and right reason is unerring law." - Philo, aka Philo of Alexandria, Philo Judaeus, Philo Judaeus of Alexandria, Yedidia, "Philon", and Philo the Jew NULL
"Order is heaven’s first law." - Alexander Pope
"Virtue is despotic; life, reputation, every earthly good, must be surrendered at her voice. The law may seem hard, but it is the guardian of what it commands: and is the only sure defence of happiness." - Jane Porter
"The law must be stable, but it must not stand still." - Roscoe Pound, fully Nathan Roscoe Pound