Top 100 First Law Quotes
#1. The Kouzes-Posner First Law of Leadership: If you don't believe in the messenger, you won't believe the message. Leaders
James M. Kouzes
#2. Pugsley's First Law of Government: All government programs accomplish the opposite of what they are designed to achieve.
John Pugsley
#3. The first law of war is to preserve ourselves and destroy the enemy.
Mao Zedong
#4. Rendall's first law of jealousy: jealousy does the cock harder and pussy wetter.
Erica Jong
#5. The very first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise and cultivate the delightfully vague.
Bill Cosby
#6. First law of pleasurable love-making in the long run, is that you don't keep naked pictures of your partner on your phone.
Abhijit Naskar
#7. First law of Bad Management: If something isn't working, do more of it.
Tom DeMarco
#8. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. [The Second Law of Robotics]
Isaac Asimov
#9. Man's rights are evident branches of, rather than deductions from, the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature.
Samuel Adams
#10. It is just physics - who can argue with Newton and the first law of thermodynamics?
Mark Hyman
#11. The first law for the historian is that he shall never dare utter an untruth. The second is that he shall suppress nothing that is true. Moreover, there shall be no suspicion of partiality in his writing, or of malice.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#12. Man's first law is to watch over his own preservation; his first care he owes to himself; and as soon as he reaches the age of reason, he becomes the only judge of the best means to preserve himself; he becomes his own master.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#13. That's the first law of magic, Specs. Misdirection. Never forget it.
Donna Tartt
#14. He broke the first law of being a vampire when he killed his own kind. If he can't stick to that simple rule, how safe do you think you are?
Derek Landy
#15. Satan's First Law of Malignity - to wit, if the worst can happen, it usually will
Stephen King
#16. First law of gossip - there's no point knowing something if somebody else doesn't know you know it.
Ben Aaronovitch
#17. I will tell you King's First Law of Recognition: You never get it when you want it, and then when it comes, you get too much.
Billie Jean King
#18. Such is the condition of organic nature! whose first law might be expressed in the words 'Eat or be eaten!' and which would seem to be one great slaughter-house, one universal scene of rapacity and injustice!
Erasmus Darwin
#19. The first law I passed in my cabinet was a law eliminating the double salary for the prime minister and the ministers. I have a salary as member of parliament. I don't want a double salary. So it was a very important decision.
Enrico Letta
#20. It seems like the first law of Nature is that everybody likes to receive things, but nobody likes to feel grateful.
Zora Neale Hurston
#21. It is the first law of practical courage. To be in the weakest camp is to be in the strongest school.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#22. Healey's First Law Of Holes: When in one, stop digging.
Denis Healey
#23. That which does not kill us often makes us wish it had.
- Jason's First law
Jason Dias
#24. I should coldly, clinically think of myself and stop worrying about other people, as though I'm a necessary woman, indispensable to their happiness and well-being. Self-preservation is the first law. I must start trying to obey the law.
Helen Van Slyke
#26. The first law of economics is that when the price goes up, consumption comes down. This is a divine law.
Ahmed Zaki Yamani
#27. First law: The pesticide paradox. Every method you use to prevent or find bugs leaves a residue of subtler bugs against which those methods are ineffective.
Boris Beizer
#28. Communication always has a purpose. Before speaking, the first law is: you must know why you are talking. You must know what you are communicating for. What do you want?
Harbhajan Singh Yogi
#30. Doubleday's First Law, which states that if you throw a fastball with insufficient speed, someone will smack it out of the park with a stick.
Jim Bouton
#33. Chaos is the first condition. Order is the first law. Continuity is the first reflection. Quietude is the first happiness.
James Stephens
#34. From this irritating reality comes The First Law of Corporate Survival for ambitious CEOs who pile on leverage and run large and unfathomable derivatives books: Modest incompetence simply won't do; it's mindboggling screw-ups that are required.
Warren Buffett
#35. We are all full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other our follies - it is the first law of nature.
Voltaire
#36. Who does not know history's first law to be that an author must not dare to tell anything but the truth? And its second that he must make bold to tell the whole truth? That there must be no suggestion of partiality anywhere in his writings? Nor of malice?
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#38. The first Law of Heaven is obedience, and it should be the first law of every home. It is the foundation of an orderly home, a successful family, and the successful lives of the children. The wife is the key.
Helen Andelin
#39. Nothing is lost, Sassenach; only changed." "That's the first law of thermodynamics," I said, wiping my nose. "No," he said. "That's faith.
Diana Gabaldon
#40. Who doesn't know that the first law of history is not to dare to say anything false, and the second is not to refrain from saying anything true?
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#41. Acceptance is such an important commodity, some have called it "the first law of personal growth".
Peter McWilliams
#42. Order is Heaven's first law; and this confessed, some are, and must be, greater than the rest, more rich, more wise; but who infers from hence that such are happier, shocks all common sense. Condition, circumstance, is not the thing; bliss is the same in subject or in king.
Alexander Pope
#43. The first law of the market is to make the largest possible profit from other people's labor or go out of business. Profitability rather than human need is the determining condition of private investment.
Michael Parenti
#44. Through silence, through meditation, and through non-judgment, you will access the first law, the Law of Pure Potentiality.
Deepak Chopra
#46. The first law of history is to dread uttering a falsehood; the next is not to fear stating the truth; lastly, the historian's writings should be open to no suspicion of partiality or animosity.
Pope Leo XIII
#47. The first law of nature is self-preservation. Cut off that which may harm you. But if it is worth preserving, and is meaningful, nourish it and have no regrets. Ultimately, this is true living and love of self ... from within.
T.F. Hodge
#48. Aronson's first law:
People who do crazy things are not necessarily crazy.
Elliot Aronson
#50. Power makes all things right. That is my first law, and my last. That is the only law that I acknowledge.
Joe Abercrombie
#51. The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.
Barry Commoner
#52. Newman's first law: It is useless to put on your brakes when you're upside down.
Paul Newman
#54. The first law of social communication is whenever you meet anyone, exalt him or her.
Harbhajan Singh Yogi
#55. Babbage's Three Laws of Difference Engines
First Law: A difference engine must have at least six cogs.
Second Law: A difference engine must be able to operate a loom.
Third law: A difference engine must be able to kill a man, should the mood so take it.
Gideon Defoe
#56. The first law of business: Make the rules or your rivals will
G.Richard Shell
#57. Order is the first law of heaven, and you have to have order to survive on Earth. Figure out what has to be done each day, each week, each year and develop a system to achieve it.
Iyanla Vanzant
#58. The first law of dietetics seems to be: if it tastes good, it's bad for you.
Isaac Asimov
#59. Rees's First Law of Quotations: When in doubt, ascribe all quotations to George Bernard Shaw.
Nigel Rees
#60. Order is heaven's first law. Order is earth's first law, too.
Brian Tracy
#61. Humankind cannot gain something without first giving something in return. To obtain, something of equal value must be lost. This is Alchemy's First Law of Equivalent Exchange. In those days, we really believed that to be the world's one, and only, truth.
Hiromu Arakawa
#62. Advice, First Law of: The correct advice to give is the advice that is desired.
Paul Dickson
#63. It is the first law of friendship that it has to be cultivated. The second is to be indulgent when the first law is neglected.
Voltaire
#64. What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly - that is the first law of nature.
Voltaire
#65. Clarke's First Law - Corollary: When, however, the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion - the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, probably right.
Isaac Asimov
#66. It is a good thing to follow the First Law of Holes: if you are in one, stop digging.
Denis Healey
#67. If the first law of friendship is that it has to be cultivated, the second law is to be indulgent when the first law has been neglected.
Voltaire
#68. The first law of sustainability: population growth and/or growth in the rate of consumption of resources cannot be sustained
Albert Allen Bartlett
#69. First law: The energy of the universe is constant. Second law: The entropy of the universe always increases.
James Gleick
#71. the first law of demonology is that if you can see it, it can see you. But
Charles Stross
#72. Memory, with its fugitive adjustments, is the merciful veil to the grim enactments of the first law. It hides the anguish in the human heart which is always craving for perpetuity.
Stacy Aumonier
#74. Memorizing facts and then regurgitating them into carefully crafted words is not science people. It's intellectual bulimia. Real science happens when we explore what we don't know. The first law of understanding the human brain and the mind within, is to be an explorer.
Abhijit Naskar
#75. Persecution is the first law of society because it is always easier to suppress criticism than to meet it.
Howard Mumford Jones
#76. The First Law of Journalism: to confirm existing prejudice, rather than contradict it.
Alexander Cockburn
#78. Zeroth law: You must play the game
First law: You can't win
Second law: You can't break even
Third law: You can't quit the game.
C.P. Snow
#79. The words carry their own momentum. A confession in motion tends to stay in motion. Newton's first law of jealousy.
Erica Jong
#80. The first law of success is concentration - to bed all the energies to one point, and to go directly to that point, looking neither to the right nor the left.
William Mathews
#81. You cannot hinder someone's free will, that's the first law of the Universe, no matter what the decision.
E.A. Bucchianeri
#82. Keeping one's guests supplied with liquor is the first law of hospitality.
Margaret Way
#83. It is conflict overall that mires people in poverty. That is the first law of development.
Andrew Mitchell
#84. It was worth repeating, because it constituted the First Law of Sentient Ordnance: Thou shalt not blow up the wrong planet. On that point the programmers had been insistent to the point of fussiness. Accordingly,
Tom Holt
#85. The first law of computer science: Every problem is solved by yet another indirection.
Bjarne Stroustrup
#87. But who is to decide who truly fears the Lord? The magistrate has no power to enforce religious demands. The laws of the First Table of the Ten Commandments are not regulations for a civil society or a political order. They belong to the realm of religion, not politics.
Roger Williams
#88. (The Hindu's first issue counted a grand total of eighty copies, printed with 'one rupee and eight annas' of borrowed money by a group of four law students and two teachers). In
Shashi Tharoor
#89. Under the urge of nature and according to the laws of development, though not understood by the adult, the child is obliged to be serious about two fundamental things ... the first is the love of activity ... The second fundamental thing is independence.
Maria Montessori
#90. If philanthropy is not voluntary, it destroys liberty and justice. The law can give nothing that has not first been taken from its owner.
Frederic Bastiat
#91. First, we could have defied both of them and could have gone to war against both of these nations for this violation of international law and interference with our neutral rights.
George William Norris
#92. There's a misconception about Barack Obama as a former constitutional law professor. First of all, there are plenty of professors who are 'legal relativists.' They tend to view legal principles as relative to whatever they're trying to achieve.
Jonathan Turley
#93. People don't feel so quarrelsome in warm weather. They get crotchety in the fall and begin to go to law about things after the first hard frosts.
Elizabeth Jane Coatsworth
#94. First, where the law is the major source for bioethics, morality is too easily confused with legality and moral questions too quickly reduced to legal questions. Moreover, the law is better at
telling us what not to do than at providing ends and goals worthy of our humanity.
Allen Verhey
#95. I find it strange that practicing law in a comfortable well-heated office is considered too demanding an occupation for women, yet laboring from dawn's first light in crowded, drafty, ill-lit sweatshops is not.
Shirley Tallman
#96. The First Amendment only says 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.' It can disrespect all it wants.
P. J. O'Rourke
#97. I could have killed her when we first met and I've been out of jail by now.
Waylon Jennings
#98. At such moments, you realize that you and the other are, in fact, one. It's a big realization. Survival is the second law of life. The first is that we are all one.
Joseph Campbell
#99. The concept that flourished during the most glorious periods of republican Rome and that appeared in the Twelve Tables of the Law as one of the first, though as yet imperfect, affirmations of the rights of man, inspired the struggle between patricians and plebeians.
Ernesto Teodoro Moneta
#100. If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
Louis D. Brandeis
