Best 9016 quotes in «law quotes» category

What presents itself to us as bourgeois legality is nothing but the violence of the ruling class, a violence raised to an obligatory norm from the outset.

What's law? Control? Law filters chaos and what drips through? Serenity? Law -- our highest ideal and our basest nature. Don't look too closely at the law. Do, and you'll find the rationalized interpretations, the legal casuistry, the precedents of convenience. You'll find the serenity, which is just another word for death.

What we fail to realize is we often become like Pharisees in our ruthless attempts to identify Pharisees (and impostors). While indeed some people use the old laws of religious pride to tear down men of God, others use the new laws of anti-religious anger to tear down men of God.

When a fixed code of laws, which must be observed to the letter, leaves no further care to the judge than to examine the acts of citizens and to decide whether or not they conform to the law as written; then the standard of the just or the unjust, which is to be the norm of conduct for the ignorant as well as for the philosophic citizen, is not a matter of controversy but of fact; then only are citizens not subject to the petty tyrannies of the many which are the more cruel as the distance between the oppressed and the oppressor is less, and which are far more fatal than those of a single man, for the despotism of many can only be corrected by the despotism of one; the cruelty of a single despot is proportioned, not to his might, but to the obstacles he encounters.

When a man admits guilt we have to believe him. We cannot set ourselves to proving to him that he is wrong. Otherwise the law courts would never function.

When a police officer is pointing a gun at you, pulling your pants up is a proven way of getting you legally killed.

When Anu the Sublime, King of the Anunnaki, and Bel, the lord of Heaven and earth, who decreed the fate of the land assigned to Marduk, the over-ruling son of Ea, God of righteousness, dominion over earthly man, and made him great among the Igigi, they called Babylon by his illustrious name, made it great on earth, and founded an everlasting kingdom in it, whose foundations are laid so solidly as those of heaven and earth; then Anu and Bel called by name me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, who feared God, to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak, so that I should rule over the black-headed people like Shamash and enlighten the land, to further the well-being of mankind. ...When Marduk sent me to rule over men, to give the protection of right to the land, I did right and righteousness in . . . , and brought about the well-being of the oppressed. [The oldest known written code of laws from around 1772 BCE]

When in court, the primary role of lawyers is not to prove or disprove innocence; unbeknown to almost all lawyers and their clients, it is to save the court time.

When interacting with a police officer, I am aware that I am in the presence of a radiation exposed person that may be showing the long term adverse effects of those toxic exposures.

When in the presence of a USA law enforcement, remember that sudden moves, running away, driving away, moving towards them, not following instructions, having a gun, and pulling up your pants may get you legally killed.

When I pass the bar, you'll be barred from bars but put behind them.

When it is a law abiding common person versus the police internal affairs regarding a corrupt or incompetent police officer, the statistics show that it is the common person that most frequently loses.

When someone harasses me, I take a look at the situation and ask the question: What motivated them? When I get the answer I report it to the police.

When left alone, quantum particles behave as multiple images of themselves (as waves, really), simultaneously moving through all possible paths in space and time. Now, again, why do we not experience this multitude around ourselves? Is it because we are probing things around us all the time? Why do all experiments that involve, say, the position of a particle make the particle suddenly be somewhere rather than everywhere? No one knows. Before you probe it, a particle is a wave of possibilities. After you've probed it, it is somewhere, and subsequently it is somewhere for ever, rather than everywhere again. Strange, that. Nothing, within the laws of quantum physics, allows for such a collapse to happen. It is an experimental mystery and a theoretical one. Quantum physics stipulates that whenever something is there, it can transform into something else, of course, but it cannot disappear. And since quantum physics allows for multiple possibilities simultaneously, these possibilities should then keep existing, even after a measurement is made. But they don't. Every possibility but one vanishes. We do not see any of the others around us. We live in a classical world, where everything is based on quantum laws but nothing resembles the quantum world.

When someone steals your heart not even the law can help you.

When the collective moral sense is relieved of the incubus of law, it may still be unjust in many instances, but its injustice will take a less permanent form and one more capable of rectification, whereas its sense of justice may be perpetually widened and increased by the growth of knowledge and human sympathy. Certainly, judging from its present influence, it will be strong enough to serve as a restraint upon those individuals who refuse to respect the rights of others. But when Society has ceased deliberately to condemn certain of its members to infamy and despair from their birth, there are both physical and moral grounds for the belief that the "criminal classes" will cease to exist. Crime will become sufficiently rare to give the mass of the population courage to face the fact that moral depravity, like madness, is a terrible affliction, a disease to be carefully treated and remedied, not punished and augmented by ill-treatment. We know this now, but we are too cowardly or too Pharisaical to admit it.

When the Rule of Law disappears, we are ruled by the whims of men.

When the Scripture relates redemption to the law of God, the terms it uses are to be carefully marked. It does not say we are redeemed from the law. That would not be an accurate description and the Scripture refrains from such an expression. We are not redeemed from the obligation to love the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and strength and mind and our neighbour as ourselves. The law is comprehended in these two commandments (Matt. 22:40) and love is the fulfilling of the law (Rom. 13:10)... It would contradict the very nature of God to think that any person can ever be relieved of the necessity to love God with the whole heart and to obey his commandments. When Scripture relates redemption to the law of God it uses terms that are more specific.

When states are democratically governed according to law, there are no demagogues, and the best citizens are securely in the saddle; but where the laws are not sovereign, there you find demagogues. The people become a monarch... such people, in its role as a monarch, not being controlled by law, aims at sole power and becomes like a master.

When the law is wrong it's because it's unnatural, but in this case it is natural and a river will drown you if you buck it now

When the police willfully break the law on video and then deny the event in writing, you know that you are dealing with a blatantly corrupt group of people.

When the Self is freed from mind there are no limits to what one can experience.

When we wonder why crime doesn't stop or end. It is because the people who are committing it. We know them very well and we cant expose them. Instead, we protect them, because we benefit from their crime.

When will the Home Office realize that when judges retire, not only are they sent home for the rest of their lives, but the only people they have left to judge are their innocent wives.' 'So what are you recommending?'asked Alex as they walked into the drawing room. 'That judges should be shot on their seventieth birthday, and their wives granted a royal pardon and given their pensions by a grateful nation.' 'I may have come up with a more acceptable solution,' suggested Alex. 'Like what? Making it legal to assist judges' wives to commit suicide?' 'Something a little less drastic,' said Alex.

When you present something in writing to a vast group of audiences that has an obscured meaning to it, it means that you are trying to delude your readers from figuring out your actual idea. This kind of act can jeopardize other peoples' life and someone who has a distinguished intelligence can eventually intervene your actions and you could face civil or criminal allegations for fraud because this kind of behavior is considered as a serious offense.

When you lived on the wrong side of the law, information, however vague or apparently meaningless, was everything. It gave you leverage. And leverage was power.

Whether Maycomb knows it or not, we're paying the highest tribute we can pay a man. We trust him to do right. It's that simple.' 'Who?' Aunt Alexandra never knew she was echoing her twelve-year-old nephew. 'The handful of people in this town who that that fair play is not marked White Only; the handful of people who say a fair trial is for everybody, not just us; the handful of people with enough humility to think, when they look at a Negro, there but for the Lord's kindness am I.

Whether or not an utterance can be called law depends on how it is heard, not on how it is meant. Law is defined by its effect rather than its intention, and its chief effect is accusation the intimation of a less-than.

Which is more just? A law for humanity or a law for a country? Any law that flies in the face of humanity is unjust. Slavery was an unjust law and it was a law against humanity.

Whether you live or die, whether you're bad or good, whether you're born or not, it's all arbitrary… but what can I say? I don’t like fate or chance, and I don’t always play by the rules, legalist as I am.

While it is a truism to observe that if humans were angels, law would be unnecessary, we could equally turn the truism around, and note that if humans were devils, law would be pointless. In this sense, the law-making project always presupposes the improvability, if not the perfectibility, of humankind. Whether our view of human nature tends toward Hobbesian grimness or Rousseauian equanimity, we tend to think of law as critical to reducing brutality and violence.

Whether or not the public should be expected to understand is not the critical point. Obviously much of the complexity of law will try the public's patience, even if the law is expressed plainly. The real problem is that even other lawyers cannot fathom what their colleagues are writing.

While we think of the boundary between what is legal and what is not as a clear dividing line, it is far from being so. Rather, the boundary becomes further and further indented and folded over time, yielding a jagged and complicated border, rather than a clear straight line. In the end, the law turns out to look like a fractal: no matter how much you zoom in on such a shape, there is always more unevenness, more detail to observe. Any general rule must end up dealing with exceptions, which in turn split into further exceptions and rules, yielding an increasingly complicated, branching structure.

Why should injustice, the darkness of justice, exist and not be an imperfect entry in a book unread for centuries? Until it is so forgotten, that no one remembers it was ever there.

Why should I give up revenge? On behalf of what? Moral principles? And what of the higher order of things, in which evil deeds are punished? For you, a philosopher and ethicist, an act of revenge is bad, disgraceful, unethical and illegal. But I ask: where is the punishment for evil? Who has it and grants access? The Gods, in which you do not believe? The great demiurge-creator, which you decided to replace the gods with? Or maybe the law? [...] I know what evil is afraid of. Not your ethics, Vysogota, not your preaching or moral treaties on the life of dignity. Evil is afraid of pain, mutilation, suffering and at the end of the day, death! The dog howls when it is badly wounded! Writhing on the ground and growls, watching the blood flow from its veins and arteries, seeing the bone that sticks out from a stump, watching its guts escape its open belly, feeling the cold as death is about to take them. Then and only then will evil begin to beg, 'Have mercy! I regret my sins! I'll be good, I swear! Just save me, do not let me waste away!'. Yes, hermit. That is the way to fight evil! When evil wants to harm you, inflict pain - anticipate them, it's best if evil does not expect it. But if you fail to prevent evil, if you have been hurt by evil, then avenge him! It is best when they have already forgotten, when they feel safe. Then pay them in double. In triple. An eye for an eye? No! Both eyes for an eye! A tooth for a tooth? No! All their teeth for a tooth! Repay evil! Make it wail in pain, howling until their eyes pop from their sockets. And then, you can look under your feet and boldly declare that what is there cannot endanger anyone, cannot hurt anyone. How can someone be a danger, when they have no eyes? How can someone hurt when they have no hands? They can only wait until they bleed to death.

Without anarchy, there would be chaos.

Without knowing it, Javert in his awful happiness was deserving of pity, like every ignorant man who triumphs. Nothing could have been more poignant or more heartrending than that countenance on which was inscribed all the evil in what is good.

Without the law commanding good there could be no evil. But the same law makes it possible for the creature to exist. Without the law man would sink into nothingness; the law determines his humanity.

Wither thou goest, I will go; thy people shall by my people; where thou diest, will I die, and there I be buried.

With its continued dismissal of the law of God in ethics, Fundamentalism expressed both a "spiritualized" form of situational ethics and a "Christianly submissive" statism.

Without territory a legal person cannot be a state.

Without trade the world will become what it was once—a hell where only the strongest arm and the heaviest lash was law. The meek will never inherit the earth. Aye, but at least they can be protected by law to live out their lives as they wish.

Woe to you experts in the law, because you have taken away the key to knowledge. You yourselves have not entered, and you have hindered those who were entering."Luke 11:52

You are interfering in my business, warlock." Magnus spat blood into his face. "You are torturing a child in my city, Shadowhunter. [...] I thought we were playing a game where we said what the other person was and what we were doing." Magnus told him. "Did I get it wrong? Can I guess again? are you breaking your own sacred Laws, asshole?

You are a lawmaker in your own right.

Would you approach a crazy person with a loaded gun? Well, that is exactly what you are doing with some police officers when you approach them.

You can’t ever really know someone else’s mind or someone else’s heart, what someone else is capable of.

You cannot expect a corrupt law enforcement system to prosecute the illegal activities of corporations and their government minions.

You can pass any law you like to make 'criminals' of those you don't like and then justify it with whatever stupid reasoning that appeals to you. Is that rule of law - or tyranny?

You can't change laws without first changing human nature... You can't change human nature without first changing the law.