Our ideals, laws and customs should be based on the proposition that each generation, in turn, becomes the custodian rather than the absolute owner of our resources and each generation has the obligation to pass this inheritance on to the future.
—Charles Lindbergh
Our dangerous class is not at the bottom; it is near the top of society. Riches without law are more dangerous than is poverty without law.
—Henry Ward Beecher
There is all the difference in the world between the criminal’s avoiding the public eye and the civil disobedient’s taking the law into his own hands in open defiance. This distinction between an open violation of the law, performed in public, and a clandestine one is so glaringly obvious that it can be neglected only by prejudice or ill will.
—Hannah Arendt
Nothing surely is as potent as a law that may not be disobeyed. It has the force of the water drop that hollows the stone. A small dainty task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.
—Anthony Trollope
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
—Anatole France
A man's respect for law and order exists in precise relationship to the size of his paycheck.
—Adam Clayton Powell Jr.
A mother's love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no law, no pity; it dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path.
—Agatha Christie
The reason there is so little crime in Germany is that it's against the law.
—Alex Levin
An incompetent attorney can delay a trial for months or years. A competent attorney can delay one even longer.
—Evelle J. Younger
Self-preservation is the first law of nature.
—Samuel Butler
A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices that the system works.
—Bill Vaughan
You may break any written law in America with impunity. There is an unwritten law that you break at your peril. It is: do not attack the profit system.
—Mary Heaton Vorse
The sign of a good marriage is that everything is debatable and challenged; nothing is turned into law or policy. The rules, if any, are known only to the two players, who seek no public trophies.
—Carolyn G. Heilbrun
I am, and always have been, a revolutionary writer, because our laws make law impossible; our liberties destroy all freedom; our property is organized robbery; our morality is an impudent hypocrisy; our wisdom is administered by inexperienced or mal-experienced dupes, our power wielded by cowards and weaklings, and our honor false in all its points. I am an enemy of the existing order for good reasons.
—George Bernard Shaw
The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.