An Unjust Law Quotes

#1. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ' an unjust law is no law at all.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#2. An unjust law in itself is an act of violence.

Mahatma Gandhi

#3. A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of Saint Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law.

Martin Luther

#4. If an unjust law is passed and enforced, then anyone coerced to comply with the law is a victim of injustice.

R.C. Sproul

#5. An unjust law is no law at all.

Augustine Of Hippo

#6. An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so.

Mahatma Gandhi

#7. An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#8. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#9. Those who deny the right of a jury to protect an individual in resisting an unjust law of the government, deny him all defence whatsoever against oppression.

Lysander Spooner

#10. When I refuse to obey an unjust law, I do not contest the right of the majority to command, but I simply appeal from the sovereignty of the people to the sovereignty of mankind.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#11. It seems to me that an unjust law is no law at all.

Saint Augustine

#12. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#13. No intelligent man has any respect for an unjust law.

Robert A. Heinlein

#14. One who breaks an unjust law that conscience tells him is unjust ... is in reality expressing the highest respect for law ... We will not obey your evil laws.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#15. There are two types of laws: there are just laws and there are unjust laws ... What is the difference between the two? ... An unjust law is a man-made code that is out of harmony with the moral law.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#16. Obeying an unjust law is itself unjust.

Ryan North

#17. [N]o American should retreat an inch on the right of jurors to acquit if they perceive the law or its administration to be unjust.

Charley Reese

#18. If every man who passed an unjust judgment on his fellow should be condemned, how many judges would be found so vain and foolish as to review and condemn their Maker's work?

Clarence Darrow

#19. Legislatures have no right to set up an inquisition and examine into the private opinions of men. Test-laws are useless and ineffectual, unjust and tyrannical.

Oliver Ellsworth

#20. An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law

Martin Luther King Jr.

#21. For Rousseau and Mandeville the absence of a moral instinct meant the laws of society had no moral validity, they were nothing but the inventions of the cunning and the powerful, in order to maintain or to acquire an unnatural and unjust superiority over the rest of their fellow creatures.

Gertrude Himmelfarb

#22. Again, a law may be both constitutional and expedient, and yet may be administered in an unjust and unfair way.

Abraham Lincoln

#23. A statute that lets some wrongfully convicted individuals seek restitution but denies that right to others is an unjust and unequal application of the law.

Eric Schneiderman

#24. The horror with which blind and unjust law regards an action never attaches to the doer in the eyes of those who love him.

Robert Louis Stevenson

#25. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#26. Anyone in a free society where the laws are unjust has an obligation to break the law.

Henry David Thoreau

#27. Of the unjust rights which in virtue of this ceremony an iniquitous law gives me over the person and property of another, I cannot legally, but I can morally, divest myself.

Robert Dale Owen

#28. The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.

Max Stirner

#29. I answer, Socrates, that rhetoric is the art of persuasion in courts of law and other assemblies, as I was just now saying, and about the just and unjust.

Gorgias