13 Quotes Tagged: Law

The lawyer’s truth is not Truth, but consistency, or a consistent expediency. Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing.

Show me a free State, and court truly of justice, and I will fight for them, if need be; but show me Massachusetts, and I refuse her my allegiance, and express contempt for her courts.

It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right.

Ordinary human laws are the means — however imperfect — by which we express our understanding of the enduring moral law.

I have not read far in the statutes of this Commonwealth. It is not profitable reading. They do not always say what is true; and they do not always mean what they say.

There are written laws—they perish; but there are also unwritten laws—they are eternal.

Necessity knows no law.

The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free. They are the lovers of law and order, who observe the law when the government breaks it.

To succeed in other trades, capacity must be shown; in the law, concealment of it will do.

Let me make the superstitions of a nation and I care not who makes its laws.

The question is not whether you or your grandfather, seventy years ago, did not enter into an agreement to serve the devil, and that service is not accordingly now due; but whether you will not now, for once and at last, serve God, —in spite of your own past recreancy, or that of your ancestor, —by obeying that eternal and only just CONSTITUTION, which He, and not any Jefferson or Adams, has written in your being.

The only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at levelling must lead, at best, to social stagnation.

Where every man has a vote, brutal laws are impossible.