"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."
— Voltaire

"Only cops and vampires have to have an invitation to enter."
— Christopher Moore

"...remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation."
— Abigail Adams

"The chance of the bread falling with the buttered side down is directly proportional to the cost of the carpet."
— Murphy's Law

"Musical innovation is full of danger to the State, for when modes of music change, the laws of the State always change with them."
— Plato (Plato's Republic)

"We cannot expect people to have respect for law and order until we teach respect to those we have entrusted to enforce those laws."
— Hunter S. Thompson

"If you have ten thousand regulations you destroy all respect for the law."
— Winston S. Churchill

"There are 4 kinds of Homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy."
— Ambrose Bierce

"We may brave human laws, but we cannot resist natural ones."
— Jules Verne (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea)

"My main problem with cops is that they do what they're told. They say 'Sorry mate, I'm just doing my job' all the fucking time.
"
— Banksy (Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall)

"A unjust law, is no law at all."
— Martin Luther (Bibelausgaben, Die Bibel nach der Übersetzung Martin Luthers, mit Apokryphen, neue Rechtschreibung, schwarz)

"Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through."
— Jonathan Swift

"Federal and state laws (should) be changed to no longer make it a crime to possess marijuana for private use."
— Richard Nixon

"You cannot solve a problem in the same frequency in which it was created."
— Lynn Grabhorn (Excuse Me, Your Life Is Waiting: The Astonishing Power of Feelings)

"Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself; and where they are, they should be changed. Nowhere is this more clear than in the laws against possession of marijuana in private for personal use... Therefore, I support legislation amending Federal law to eliminate all Federal criminal penalties for the possession of up to one ounce [28g] of marijuana."
— Jimmy Carter

"The minute you read something that you can't understand, you can almost be sure that it was drawn up by a lawyer. "
— Will Rogers

"It is impossible to enslave, mentally or socially, a bible-reading people. The principles of the bible are the groundwork of human freedom."
— Horace Greeley

"The White House usually followed the seagull theory of management: fly in, squawk and flap and shit, and fly away."
— John Frohnmayer (LEAVING TOWN ALIVE CL)

"No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be within the law? The law is stationary. The law is fixed. The law is a chariot wheel which binds us all regardless of conditions or place or time. "
— Emma Goldman (Anarchism and Other Essays)

"As one judge said to another judge: be just. And if you can’t be just, be arbitrary
"
— William S. Burroughs

"Solomon's Laws
1. When the law doesn't work...work the law."
— Paul Levine (Solomon vs. Lord)

"Solomon's Laws

10. We all hold the keys to our own jail cells."
— Paul Levine (Solomon vs. Lord)

"Floyd could imagine a dozen things that could go wrong; it was little consolation that it was always the thirteenth that actuslly happened."
— Arthur C. Clarke (2010: Odyssey Two)

"There are two Newman's laws. The first one is "It is useless to put on your brakes when your upside down." The second is "Just when things look darkest, they go black." Paul Newman "
— Paul Newman

"Religion is never more tested than when our emotions are ablaze. At such a time, the timeless grandeur of the Law and its ethics stand at our mercy."
— Abdal Hakim Murad

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the people discover they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the canidate promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that democracy always collapses over a loose fiscal policy--to be followed by a dictatorship."
— Lord Woodhouselee

"What is law? Is it what is on the books, or what is actually enacted and obeyed in a society? Or is law what must be enacted and obeyed, whether or not it is on the books, if things are to go right?"
— Bernhard Schlink (The Reader)

"Because this law could mean so much or so little, it held potential for causing great mischief in the world of art and politics. We needed to reduce its uncertainty, and the best way to do that, I believed, was to force a court to interpret it, which would either void or narrow the law. To make it as broad a target as possible and to assure that someone would sue us, I reproduced the Helms amendment verbatim in the terms and conditions for grant recipients. It could not be ignored there, and if it was to be declared unconstitutional, it had to appear where the courts could not ignore it either."
— John Frohnmayer (LEAVING TOWN ALIVE CL)

"It seemed to me that if the lawyers failed to do their duty, they ought to pay people for waiting upon them, instead of making them pay for it."
— R.D. Blackmore (Lorna Doone)

"Ignorance of the law of irreducibility was no excuse. I could no longer excuse myself with the claim that I didn't know the law -- for knowledge of self and of the world is the law that, even though unattainable, cannot be broken, and no one can excuse himself by saying that he doesn't know it. . . . The renewed originality of the sin is this: I have to carry out my unknowing, I shall be sinning originally against life."
— Clarice Lispector (The Passion According to G.H.)

"Security subsists, too, in fidelity to freedom's first principles. ... The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times. Liberty and security can be reconciled; and in our system they are reconciled within the framework of the law."
— Justice Anthony Kennedy

"Those fellows, they're always crying over killers. Never a thought for the victims."
— Truman Capote (In Cold Blood)

"An apocryphal story recounts the dilhemma of a man during the Civil War who could not decide whether to join the Confederate or Union forces. Finally he put on a gray coat and blue pants, and both sides shot him."
— John Frohnmayer (LEAVING TOWN ALIVE CL)

"He proved that it was equally true if the disregard was by a ruler or by a people. "It spreads like a disease," he said. "And it's infinitely more deadly when the law is disregarded by men pretending to act for justice than when it's simply inefficient, or even when its elected administrator's are crooked."
— Walter Van Tilburg Clark

"Then our crime's worse than a murderer's. His act puts him outside the law, but keeps the law intact. Ours would weaken the law."
— Walter Van Tilburg Clark

"We desire justice, and justice has never been obtained in haste and strong feeling."
— Walter Van Tilburg Clark

"[American family court] is a system that is corrupt on his best day. It is like being tied to the back of a pickup truck and dragged down a gravel late at night. No one can hear your cries and complaints and it is not over until they say it's over."
— Alec Baldwin (A Promise to Ourselves: Fatherhood, Divorce, and Family Law)

"It was Francisco de Vitoria, a Catholic priest and professor, who earned the title of father of international law."
— Thomas E. Woods Jr.

"The idea of formulated 'rights ... comes not from John Locke and Thomas Jefferson ... but from the canon law of the Catholic Church. "
— Thomas E. Woods Jr.

"Churchmen sought to introduce rational trial procedures and sophisticated legal principles in place of the superstition-based trial by ordeal that had characterized the Germanic legal order."
— Thomas E. Woods Jr.

"Vice may triumph for a time, crime may flaunt its victories in the face of honest toilers, but in the end the law will follow the wrong-doer to a bitter fate, and dishonor and punishment will be the portion of those who sin."
— Allan Pinkerton

"Justice is the insurance which we have on our lives and property. Obedience is the premium which we pay for it. "
— William Penn

"Jigga, Kells, Not Guilty"
— R. Kelly

"Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity."
— John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton

"During my tenure at the Endowment, I often found that those who did us the most damage did so under the justification of helping us by 'preventing worse language.' In the military it would be called friendly fire. One ends up just as dead."
— John Frohnmayer (LEAVING TOWN ALIVE CL)