Top 100 Law Reason Quotes
#1. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.
Robert H. Jackson
#2. Law does, "because God said so!"; Grace does because it understands the reason God said so.
D.R. Silva
#3. Ruth, if you don't want to go to law school, you have the best reason in the world and no one would think less of you," Morris said. "But if you really want to go to law school, you will stop feeling sorry for yourself. You will find a way.
Irin Carmon
#4. The masses are the material of democracy, but its form-that is to say, the laws which express the general reason, justice, and utility-can only be rightly shaped by wisdom, which is by no means a universal property.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#5. Reason is the life of the law; nay, the common law itself is nothing else but reason - the law which is perfection of reason.
Edward Coke
#6. The Law is Reason free from Passion.
Aristotle.
#7. The Question to be considered is, Whether the Government have reason by a Law, to prohibit the taking more than 4 l. per cent Interest for Money lent, or to leave the Borrower and Lender to make their own Bargains.
Dudley North
#8. I think a major reason why intellectuals tend to move towards collectivism is that the collectivist answer is a simple one. If there's something wrong, pass a law and do something about it.
Milton Friedman
#9. What could ever be a sufficient reason for excusing in any way the direct murder of the innocent? This is precisely what we are dealing with here. Whether inflicted upon the mother or upon the child, it is against the precept of God and the law of nature: 'Thou shalt not kill.'
Pope Pius XI
#10. But there's a reason that we have different laws for juveniles than we do for adults. And it's because kids are not liable for the things they do in the way that adults are, because we think that kids are different.
Rachel Maddow
#11. The power of the bleeding love of God is stronger than the power of Caesar, of the law, of Mars, Mammon, Aphrodite and the rest. This is the point that Paul grasped. And that is the reason for the Colossians' gratitude. The battle has been won.
N. T. Wright
#12. But I cannot recite, even thus rudely, laws of the intellect, without remembering that lofty and sequestered class of men who have been its prophets and oracles, the high-priesthood of the pure reason, the Trismegisti, the expounders of the principles of thought from age to age.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#13. The most universal and effectual way of discovering the true meaning of law, when the words are dubious, is by considering the reason and spirit of it; or the cause which moved the legislator to enact it. for when this reason ceased, the law itself ought likewise to cease with it.
William Blackstone
#14. Nature has with a Motherly Tenderness observed this, that the Action she has enjoyned us for our Necessity should be also pleasant to us, and invites us to them, not only by Reason, but also by Appetite: and 'tis Injustice to infringe her Laws.
Michel De Montaigne
#15. People who want to express themselves need to be given an opportunity. For me, it's a very fundamental premise: you break the law, you're going to jail. Absent that, you're entitled to say whatever you want to say within reason.
Bob Buckhorn
#16. Conscience has nothing to do as lawgiver or judge; but is a witness against me if I do wrong, and which approves if I do right. To act against conscience is to act against reason and God's Law.
Artur Phleps
#17. No axiom is more clearly established in law or in reason than wherever the end is required, the means are authorized; wherever a general power to do a thing is given, every particular power for doing it is included.
James Madison
#18. Law that shocks equity is reason's murderer.
Aaron Hill
#19. What law, what reason can deny that gift so sweet, so natural that God has given a stream, a fish, a beast, a bird?
Pedro Calderon De La Barca
#20. I'm an ambitious person, and Harvard makes me feel successful, just having gotten in here. That's the ugly side of why I'm proud of being at Harvard Law School. Another reason is because there's a spirit of serious intellectual endeavor here.
Scott Turow
#21. It is unclear exactly how many law enforcement agencies are currently using this capability, but it is reasonable to say that while resource limitations used to discourage the government from tracking you without a good reason, these constraints have largely disappeared.
Ron Wyden
#22. If equity and human natural reason were allowed there would be no law, there would be no lawyers.
Christina Stead
#23. One reason why mathematics enjoys special esteem,above all other sciences,is
that its laws are absolutely certain and indisputable,while those of all
other sciences are to some extent debatable and in constant danger of being
overthrown by newly discovered facts.
Albert Einstein
#24. The law of right-left symmetry was used in classical physics but was not of any great practical importance there. One reason for this derives from the fact that right-left symmetry is a discrete symmetry, unlike rotational symmetry, which is continuous.
Chen-Ning Yang
#25. The good of the people must be the great purpose of government. By the laws of nature and of reason, the governors are invested with power to that end. And the greatest good of the people is liberty. It is to the state what health is to the individual.
Denis Diderot
#26. Work, work, proletarians, to increase social wealth and your individual poverty; work, work, in order that becoming poorer, you may have more reason to work and become miserable. Such is the inexorable law of capitalist production.
Paul Lafargue
#27. There is a real and evident problem of democracy in Georgia, and this was the core reason of my entrance into politics. We have no rule of law. It's absolutely absent.
Bidzina Ivanishvili
#28. We have environmental laws for a reason: to protect endangered biodiversity. And as a country that has one of the highest loss of species anywhere in the world, they're important.
Richard Di Natale
#29. A Law of Nature, (Lex Naturalis) is a Precept, or general Rule, found out by Reason, by which a man is forbidden to do, that, which is destructive of his life, or taketh away the means of preserving the same; and to omit, that, by which he thinketh it may be best preserved.
Thomas Hobbes
#30. The reason I like the criminal justice system is there aren't Republican or Democrat victims or police officers or prosecutors. It's about respect for the rule of law!
Trey Gowdy
#31. Prohibition ... goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes ... A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.
Abraham Lincoln
#32. Law; an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community.
Thomas Aquinas
#33. Law is experience developed by reason and applied continually to further experience.
Roscoe Pound
#34. Fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalised medium of reason, that's all we have between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feelings.
Felix Frankfurter
#35. But the reason America is a great country, the reason is because our compassion is in our laws. And when we live by those laws and we treat everybody equally under the law, that's when people feel good about being Americans.
Rick Santorum
#36. The law may upset reason but reason may never upset the law, or our whole society will shred like an old tatami. The law may be used to confound reason, reason must certainly not be used to overthrow the law.
James Clavell
#37. But the law of loving others could not be discovered by reason, because it is unreasonable.
Leo Tolstoy
#39. One universe made up all that is; and one God in it all, and one principle of being, and one law, the reason shared by all thinking creatures, and one truth.
Marcus Aurelius
#40. A reasonable fine is such as the law will judge to be so ... but what a reasonable fine is, and who shall be the judge of it, the law has established no rule.
Philip Yorke, 1st Earl Of Hardwicke
#41. Law is nothing other than a certain ordinance of reason for the common good, promulgated by the person who has the care of the community.
Thomas Aquinas
#42. Justice is the reason we have law, and law is man's feeble attempt to teach decency to others.
Joy Ratcliff Cagle
#43. Even though most people who reject Christianity treat it as a refuge for enemies of reason, the truth is that there may be no worldview in the history of the human race that has a higher regard for the laws of logic.
Ronald H. Nash
#44. I think it's important to break taboos for the same reason it's important to break laws and rules - because either you're a slave to them, or you're taking matters into your hands.
George Carlin
#45. Animals never have recourse to law courts, because they have no will to love; but man, having reason, feels the need of justifying his irrational behavior when he does wrong.
Fulton J. Sheen
#46. Education is the constraining and directing of youth towards that right reason, which the law affirms, and which the experience of the best of our elders has agreed to be truly right.
Plato
#47. Tied up with his dismissal of natural law is Hayek's continuous, and all-pervasive, attack on reason. Reason is his bete noire, and time and time again, from numerous and even contradictory standpoints, he opposes it.
Murray Rothbard
#48. Mere Morality can be summarized as: using instinct, law, and reason as guides, try to act with the intention of minimizing harm.
Dan Barker
#49. Great actors come with depth about how their character sees the world, and they completely defend it. They could defend it in a court of law, down to the reason the patient deserved this.
M. Night Shyamalan
#50. God's law is 'right reason.' When perfectly understood it is called 'wisdom.' When applied by government in regulating human relations it is called 'justice.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#51. Time changes all things; there is no reason why language should escape this universal law
Ferdinand De Saussure
#52. Education must remove hatred between the pilgrims on the various roads to God. There is only one God, one Goal, one Law, one Truth, one Religion and one Reason.
Sathya Sai Baba
#53. True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrongdoing by its prohibitions.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#54. 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
#55. Marijuana is not much more difficult to obtain than beer. The reason for this is that a liquor store selling beer to a minor stands to lose its liquor license. Marijuana salesmen don't have expensive overheads, and so are not easily punished.
William F. Buckley Jr.
#56. Law in general is human reason, inasmuch as it governs all the inhabitants of the earth: the political and civil laws of each nation ought to be only the particular cases in which human reason is applied.
Charles De Secondat
#57. No one can depute authority. It comes too much from personal accidents, and too little from reason or law to be handed over to others.
Anthony Trollope
#58. Law is the highest reason implanted in Nature, which commands what ought to be done and forbids the opposite.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#59. For some reason, people repeatedly have asked RBG when she thought there would be enough women on the court. The question is asinine, her answer effective: 'When there are nine.
Irin Carmon
#60. I observe there is in Mr. Hooker no affected language; but a grave, comprehensive, clear manifestation of reason, and that backed with the authority of the Scriptures, the fathers and schoolmen, and with all law both sacred and civil.
Richard Hooker
#61. While we are under the tyranny of Priests, it will ever be their interest, to invalidate the law of nature and reason, in order to establish systems incompatible therewith.
Ethan Allen
#62. The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#63. I'm so good at my job the law thinks I'm three different hit men and a serial killer. I speak Russian and French, I never had a pet, and the reason why you hate my coffee is that it's decaf.
J. Fally
#64. The eternal struggle in the law between constancy and change is largely a struggle between history and reason, between past reason and present needs.
Felix Frankfurter
#65. If any difference should be made by law between husband and wife, reason, justice and humanity, if their voices were heard, would dictate that it should be in her favor.
Ernestine Rose
#66. I went to law school for the same reason everyone else goes to law school: I had no idea what to do with my life and my parents were paying.
Jodi Picoult
#67. Let us consider the reason of the case. For nothing is law that is not reason.
John Powell
#68. I will do anything that is basically covered by the law to reduce Berkshire's tax rate. For example, on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That's the only reason to build them. They don't make sense without the tax credit.
Warren Buffett
#69. The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it.
John Locke
#70. Practically every fella that breaks the law has a danged good reason, to his own way of thinking, which makes every case exceptional, not just one or two. Take you, for example.
Jim Thompson
#71. I've had women come up to me and say I was the reason they went to law school.
Susan Dey
#72. In some ways I'm still recovering from the trial. My health is not as good as it ought to be. I've gone back to practicing law and it seems to have taken a toll for whatever reason.
Christopher Darden
#73. For there is but one essential justice which cements society, and one law which establishes this justice. This law is right reason, which is the true rule of all commandments and prohibitions. Whoever neglects this law, whether written or unwritten, is necessarily unjust and wicked.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#74. We adults protect ourselves with laws, police, workplace regulations and social norms and there is no conceivable reason why children should be left more vulnerable, other that laziness or callousness in considering what life is like from their point of view.
Steven Pinker
#75. Englishmen are said to love their laws; - that is the reason, I suppose, they give us so many of them, and in different editions.
Anna Letitia Barbauld
#76. Reason and reality are the only means to just laws; mindless wishes, if given sovereignty, become deadly masters.
Terry Goodkind
#77. It may have been a comedy, or it may have been a tragedy. It cost one man his reason, it cost me a blood-letting, and it cost yet another man the penalties of the law. Yet there was certainly an element of comedy. Well, you shall judge for yourselves.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#78. I devote myself to what I love the most, and for this very reason I hesitate to designate it with lofty words: I do not want to risk believing that it is a sublime compulsion, a law, which I obey: I love what I love the most too much to wish to appear to it as one compelled.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#79. But who discovered it? Not reason. Reason discovered the struggle for existence, and the law that requires us to oppress all who hinder the satisfaction of our desires. That is the deduction of reason. But loving one's neighbor reason could never discover, because it's irrational.
Leo Tolstoy
#80. Ethics evolve naturally, and we trample upon them with laws created by reason and experience.
Winston Churchill
#83. Under Florida's "stand your ground" law, it is legal to shoot anybody for any reason as long as you are standing on the ground.
Dave Barry
#84. I don't see any reason to let law interfere with justice around here. We never did before.
Sid Fleischman
#85. How long soever it hath continued, if it be against reason, it is of no force in law.
Edward Coke
#86. Weddings in our society seem designed to reduce the bride and groom to precisely the condition of those who, because they 'lack sufficient use of reason,' are 'incapable of contracting marriage,' according to canon law.
Nancy Mairs
#87. I lose my patience, and I own it too,
When works are censur'd, not as bad but new;
While if our Elders break all reason's laws,
These fools demand not pardon but Applause.
Alexander Pope
#89. With many sovereign states, with no system of law enforceable among them, with each state judging its grievances and ambitions according to the dictates of its own reason or desire - conflict, sometimes leading to war, is bound to occur.
Kenneth Waltz
#90. Subdue By force, who reason for their law refuse, Right reason for their law.
John Milton
#91. Lawyers may reason powerfully, but power settles most issues.
Mason Cooley
#92. Good taste is either that which agrees with my taste or that which subjects itself to the rule of reason. From this we can see how useful it is to employ reason in seeking out the laws of taste.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#93. True generosity is a duty as indispensably necessary as those imposed upon us by the law. It is a rule imposed upon us by reason, which should be the sovereign law of a rational being.
Oliver Goldsmith
#94. I am not anarchist. I have nothing against government or law enforcement in general. It is solely for the reason that this govt has legalized the murder of children that I have no allegiance to nor do I recognize the legitimacy of this particular government in Washington.
Eric Rudolph
#95. Whether arrived at through reason or revelation ... natural law is the highest law known to man. It is anchored in the very existential nature of man and is therefore a priori just.
Ilana Mercer
#96. For just as the first general precepts of the law of nature are self-evident to one in possession of natural reason, and have no need of promulgation, so also that of believing in God is primary and self-evident to one who has faith: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is.
Thomas Aquinas
#97. If the will, which in the law of our nature, were withdrawn from our memory, fancy, understanding, and reason, no other hell could equal, for a spiritual being, what we should then feel from the anarchy of our powers. It would be conscious madness,
a horrid thought!
John Milton
#98. No man has a right to disturb the public peace, by personally resisting the execution of a law however bad. He ought to acquiesce, using at the same time the utmost powers of his reason, to promote its repeal.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#99. But the motion to keep the planet going in a straight line has no known reason. The reason why things coast for ever has never been found out. The law of inertia has no known origin. Although
Richard Feynman
#100. The law of nature instructs most animals to cherish and educate their infant progeny. The law of reason inculcates to the human species the returns of filial piety.
Edward Gibbon
