Sourced

• If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for the law. It invites every man to become a law unto himself. It invites anarchy.
  • U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, dissenting; Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 1928.

• The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself.
  • Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853).

• The rule of law can be wiped out in one misguided, however will-intentioned generation. And if that should happen, it could take a century of striving and ordeal to restore it, and then only at the cost of the lives of many good men and women.
  • William T. Gossett, President of the American Bar Association, August 9, 1969 speech.

• The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science, that smiles in yer face while it picks yer pocket; and the glorious uncertainty of it is of mair use to the professors than the justice of it.
  • Charles Macklin, Love à la Mode (1759), Act ii. Sc. 1.

• Laws, in their most general signification, are the necessary relations derived from the nature of things.
  • Montesquieu, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 375.

• If one were to pass a law limiting holistic physicians to a single holistic method, I would stick with my dentist.
  • Thomas Rau, Biological Medicin (German: Biologische Medizin, Fona-Verlag (2007) - ISBN 978-3-03780-803-0) - p. 144

• As Bob Dylan forgot to say, "To live outside the law, you must be lucky."
  • Spider Robinson, in Callahan's Key (2000).

• Necessity creates the law,—it supersedes rules; and whatever is reasonable and just in such cases is likewise legal.
  • William Scott, 1st Baron Stowell, The Gratitude (1801), 3 Rob. Adm. Rep. 240. Note that "The Gratitude" is the name of a legal case in admiralty, such cases being styled by the name of the vessel at issue.

• Quædam iura non scripta, sed omnibus scriptis certiora sunt.
  • Some laws are not written, but are more decisive than any written law.
  • Seneca the Elder, Controversiae , Bk. 1, ch. 1, sect. 14; translation from Norman T. Pratt Seneca's Drama (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983) p. 140.

• We must not make a scarecrow of the law,
  Setting it up to fear the birds of prey,
  And let it keep one shape, till custom make it
  Their perch and not their terror.
  • William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure (c. 1604), Act II, scene i.

• Law is the rule, principle, obligation or requirement of natural justice.
  • Lysander Spooner, The Unconstitutionality of Slavery (1860).

• First Law of Law: You can't invent the wheel without bending the rules.
  • Leonid S. Sukhorukov, All About Everything (2005).

• No man e'er felt the halter draw,
  With good opinion of the law.
  • John Trumbull, McFingal, Canto iii (1782), line 489.

• Because the laws of this country do not prevent the strong from crushing the weak.
  • Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom: A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People.

• The law isn't perfect. Neither are the people who've created it. But it's been made with the endless effort to do good.
  • Takeshi Kaga as Soichiro Yagami, "Death Note: The Last Name" (2006). (author?)

Unsourced

• The law is a trade secret and the public process a business owned and operated by the legal profession.
  • Patrick Eberhart

• Technology is a sprinter, the law is a marathon runner.
  • A.K.T. Rex

• There is no jewel in the world comparable to learning; no learning so excellent as knowledge of laws.
  • Edward Coke

• The law is what it is - a majestic edifice, sheltering all of us, each stone of which rests on another.
  • John Galsworthy

• Fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalized medium of reason, that's all we have standing between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feeling.
  • Justice Felix Frankfurter.

• If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made.
  • Otto von Bismarck

• Instead of the law serving the people, it is the people that serve the law.
  • Amir Afsai

• The law is a bottomless pit.
  • John Arbuthnot

• Legislate in haste, repent at leisure.
  • proverb

• Covenants without the sword are but words.
  • Thomas Hobbes

• Law cannot persuade where it cannot punish.
  • Thomas Fuller

• 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

• So you think the police foresees and knows everything. The police invents more than it discovers.
  • Napoléon Bonaparte

• A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.
  • Robert Frost

• Executing a murderer is the only way to adequately express our horror at the taking of an innocent life. Nothing else suffices. To equate the lives of killers with those of victims is the worst kind of moral equivalency. If capital punishment is state murder, then imprisonment is state kidnapping and restitution is state theft.
  • Don Feder

• It is not the responsibility of the government or the legal system to protect a citizen from himself.
  • Justice Casey Percell

• More laws can't make us safe from the tragedies that are the inevitable result of freedom, and of living around other people. Life is real, life is uncertain, life is inevitably unsafe. Measures to make it safe at all costs come with dangers of their own.
  • Brian Doherty

• There are no good laws except simple laws.
  • Chrétien de Malesherbes (1775)

• No brilliance is required in law, just common sense and relatively clean fingernails.
  • John Mortimer

• Morality cannot be legislated but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart but they can restrain the heartless.
  • Martin Luther King

• One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.
  • Martin Luther King

• Land is built by law.
  • Old Swedish Law book

• We live in and by the law. It makes us what we are: citizens and employees and doctors and spouses and people who own things. It is sword, shield, and menace: we insist on our wage, or refuse to pay our rent, or are forced to forfeit penalties, or are closed up in jail, all in the name of what our abstract and ethereal sovereign, the law, has decreed. And we argue about what it has decreed, even when the books that are supposed to record its commands and directions are silent; we act then as if law had muttered its doom, too low to be heard distinctly. We are subjects of law's empire, liegemen to its methods and ideals, bound in spirit while we debate what we must therefore do.
  • Ronald Dworkin, Preface to Law's Empire

• Once you attempt legislation upon religious grounds, you open the way for every kind of intolerance and religious persecution.
  • William Butler Yeats

• If a law is unjust, we owe it to our children to disobey.
  • Sudo

• Let all the laws be clear, uniform and precise. To interpret laws is almost always to corrupt them.
  • Voltaire

• Tis much more prudence to acquit two persons, though actually guilty, than to pass sentence of condemnation on one that is virtuous and innocent.
  • Voltaire

• Prisoner: I want to ask whether it is likely —
  Arabin: We have nothing to do with what is likely or unlikely: so many unlikely things happen in courts of justice that public time must not be wasted on such enquiries.
  • Commissioner Serjeant William Arabin, quoted by Stephen Tumim in Great Legal Fiascos, page 115.
  • Arabin's surreal absurdities from the bench at the Old Bailey in the early 1800s made him a cult figure among young barristers.

• Laws are only observed with the consent of the individuals concerned and a moral change still depends on the individual and not on the passage of any law.
  • Eleanor Roosevelt

• Laws: We know what they are, and what they are worth! They are spider webs for the rich and mighty, steel chains for the poor and weak, fishing nets in the hands of government.
  • Pierre Proudhon

• The Law is the true embodiment,
  Of everything that's excellent,
  It has no kind of fault or flaw,
  And I, my Lords, embody the Law.
  • W.S. Gilbert (Iolanthe)

• Who ever knew an honest brute/ at law his neighbor prosecute?
  • Johnathan Swift, The Logicians Refuted, 1735