English Law Quotes

#1. The one great principle of English law is to make business for itself.

Charles Dickens

#2. English Law: where there are two alternatives: one intelligent, one stupid; one attractive, one vulgar; one noble, one ape-like; one serious and sincere, one undignified and false; one far-sighted, one short; EVERYBODY will INVARIABLY choose the latter.

Cyril Connolly

#3. The process of specialization tends, almost inevitably, to narrow the sources from which the rules of any science are drawn; and English law is no exception from this rule.

Edward Jenks

#4. Drink a health to the wonders of the western world, the pirates, preachers, poteen-makers, with the jobbing jockies; parching peelers, and the juries fill their stomachs selling judgments of the English law.

John Millington Synge

#5. The air of England is too pure for a slave to breathe, and so everyone who breathes it becomes free. Everyone who comes to this island is entitled to the protection of English law, whatever oppression he may have suffered and whatever may be the colour of his skin.

William Murray, 1st Earl Of Mansfield

#6. An English law never made magical flight an offence.

Lois Martin

#7. Under English law the penalty for eating meat on Friday was hanging. The law remained on the books until the sixteenth century, when Henry VIII broke with the Vatican.

Mark Kurlansky

#8. It was not long before English Law took the one step needed to produce the modern scheme of legal remedies. And when it did, it used the Writ of Trespass as the starting point.

Edward Jenks

#9. My ancestors were Puritans from England. They arrived here in 1648 in the hope of finding greater restrictions than were permissible under English law at that time.

Garrison Keillor

#10. It is the glory of English Law, that its roots are sunk deep into the soil of national history; that it is the slow product of the age long growth of the national life.

Edward Jenks

#11. If the prosecution of crime is to be conducted with so little regard for that protection which centuries of English law have given to the individual, we are indeed at the dawn of a new era; and much that we have deemed vital to our liberties, is a delusion.

Learned Hand

#12. The basis of English law is as simple as this: If you would know the future's shape, look to the past.

John Pipkin

#13. I understand that you take the Bible, as written in English, translated many many times over the last three millennia as to be a more accurate, more reasonable assessment of the natural laws we see around us than what I and everybody in here can observe. That, to me, is unsettling.

Bill Nye

#14. But the nation's business must go forward, and this is how: an act to give Wales members of Parliament, and make English the language of the law courts, and to cut from under them the powers of the lords of the Welsh marches.

Hilary Mantel

#15. And of course we are familiar with the English common law rule of thumb that said a man could in fact use a stick no bigger than his thumb to discipline his wife and family.

Patricia Ireland

#16. The First Amendment ... begins with the five loveliest words in the English language: 'Congress shall make no law'.

George Will

#17. An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.

Edith Wharton

#18. English banjo players really were a law unto themselves - you don't find that kind of brisk banjo playing on the original Louis Armstrong or Bix Beiderbecke records.

Pete Townshend

#19. The English Language is a form of communication! Words aren't only bombs and bullets - no, they're little gifts, containing meanings. What is true in love, is equally true at law

Phillip Roth

#20. English orthography satisfies all the requirements of the canons of reputability under the law of conspicuous waste. It is archaic, cumbrous, and ineffective; its acquisition consumes much time and effort; failure to acquire it is easy of detection.

Thorstein Veblen

#21. 2. We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.

Winston S. Churchill

#22. According to the law of custom, and perhaps of reason, foreign travel completes the education of an English gentleman.

Edward Gibbon

#23. My mother-in-law speaks not a word of English. I speak not a word of Tajiki. So I smile at her ingratiatingly and she fixes me with a beady eye.

Wilbur Smith

#24. This Old Testament - containing error, folly, absurdity and immorality - is by English statute law declared to be of divine authority, a blasphemy - if there were anyone to be blasphemed - blacker and more insolent than any word ever written or penned by the most hotheaded Freethinker.

Annie Besant

#25. Yes, they broke the law, but we can't deport them. Let's get over this pointing fingers and do something about that, whether it - they have to pay a fine, learn to speak English, the history, you can do that. And then you have to give visas for the skills we need.

Michael Bloomberg

#26. The fraudulent electrical utility company in conjunction with the corrupt sheriff taught me that an Englishman's home is not his castle

Steven Magee

#27. The jury system has come to stand for all we mean by English justice. The scrutiny of 12 honest jurors provides defendants and plaintiffs alike a safeguard from arbitrary perversion of the law.

Winston Churchill

#28. If we do not get No Child Left Behind right for Limited English Proficient students, the law will be a failure for most schools in the 15th Congressional District, and for many across the nation.

Ruben Hinojosa

#29. The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.

Oliver Goldsmith

#30. The English practice of accommodating the rules of commercial law to commercial practice. The line of causation ran from economic need to legal response

Nathan Rosenberg

#31. Do not be surprised when those who ignore the rules of grammar also ignore the law. After all, the law is just so much grammar.

Robert Breault

#32. I wouldn't say no to being in a film with Jude Law. I love English actors.

Catherine Deneuve

#33. If there's anything I'd hate as a son-in-law, it's an actor; and if there's anything I think I'd hate worse than an actor as a son-in-law, it's an English actor.

Joseph P. Kennedy

#34. The California supreme court, following the English common-law, decided that the owner of land bordering a watercourse was entitled only to the usufruct of the water; that if he used it he must return it to its original course unimpaired in quality and undiminished in volume.

Jerome Hart

#35. By the English common law, her husband was her lord and master. He had the custody of her person, and of her minor children. He could 'punish her with astick no bigger than his thumb,' and she could not complain against him.

Harriet Hanson Robinson

#36. Englishmen learn Christ's law best in English. Moses heard God's law in his own tongue; so did Christ's apostles.

John Wycliffe

#37. The laws of cricket tell of the English love of compromise between a particular freedom and a general orderliness, or legality.

Neville Cardus

#38. You Englishmen,' said Herr Wurter. 'You are all the same. Wherever you are you behave as if you were at home and your word was law.

Derek Raymond

#39. Is it surprising that modern English land law should resemble a chaos rather than a system?

Edward Jenks