Top 100 Quotes About Society And Law
#1. Methamphetamine is a hideous drug. Meth makes a person become paranoid, violent, and aggressive - making them a serious threat to society and law enforcement. And maybe more importantly, meth users are a threat to their own children and families.
Dirk Kempthorne
#2. Society is an organism which obeys the immutable law of progress; and change, judicious and cautious change, is necessary for the well being, and indeed the preservation of the social system.
Swami Vivekananda
#3. [P]erfect freedom consists in obeying the dictates of right reason, and submitting to natural law. When a man goes beyond or contrary to the law of nature and reason, he ... introduces confusion and disorder into society ... [thus] where licentiousness begins, liberty ends.
Samuel West
#4. The future of modern society depends much more on the quiet heroism of the very few who are inspired by God. These few will greatly enjoy the divine inspiration and will be prepared to stand for the dignity of Man and true freedom and to keep the Law of God, even of it means martyrdom or death.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#5. Similarly, gender-equality, supremacy of law, political participation, civil society, and transparency are among the indispensable elements that are the imperatives of democratization.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan
#6. Oh, had I received the education I desired, had I been bred to the profession of the law, I might have been a useful member of society, and instead of myself and my property being taken care of, I might have been a protector of the helpless, a pleader for the poor and unfortunate.
Sarah Moore Grimke
#7. It confirms my idea that you also need more liberal gun laws. Guns lead to a polite society, as we like to say in the United States. And I think that all of western Canada would agree with me.
Ann Coulter
#8. MISDEMEANOR, n. An infraction of the law having less dignity than a felony and constituting no claim to admittance into the best criminal society.
Ambrose Bierce
#9. Just like we respect your legal system, you [europeans] should respect our legal system. You cannot impose your values on us, otherwise the world will become the law of the jungle. Every society decides what its laws are, and it's the people who make decisions with regards to these laws.
Adel Al-Jubeir
#10. Where is the society which does not struggle along under a dead-weight of tradition and law inherited from its grandfather?
Suzanne La Follette
#11. Humanistic law aims at saving man and remaking society. For Humanism, salvation is an act of the state.
R.J. Rushdoony
#12. Regarding homophobia in general, the good news is that there is a lot less of it than there used to be. The bad news is that it ever existed in the first place, and the worse news is that it remains far stronger than is healthy for a society dedicated in theory to equality under the law.
Barney Frank
#13. Trade creates jobs and lifts people out of poverty. And when that happens, societies stabilize and grow. And there is nothing like a stable society to fight terrorism and strengthen democracy, freedom and rule of law.
Dennis Hastert
#14. ( ... ) personal prejudice and financial greed are the two great evils that threaten courts of law, and once they get the upper hand they immediately hamstring society, by destroying all justice.
Thomas More
#15. Culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society
Edward Burnett Tylor
#16. Laws, religions, creeds, and systems of ethics, instead of making society better than its best unit, make it worse than its average unit, because they are never up to date.
George Bernard Shaw
#17. It is a policeman's duty to retrieve stolen property and return it to its owners. But when robbery becomes the purpose of the law, and the policeman's duty becomes, not protection, but the plunder of property - then it is an outlaw who has to become a policeman.
Ayn Rand
#18. I was training to be a lawyer ... I was president of the law society at Glasgow University, and my bass guitarist was my secretary of my law society; the lead guitarist and writer worked at the law firm that I worked.
Gerard Butler
#19. Imagine how wicked society would be if the fear of God and the fear of civil law were both completely removed.
Ray Comfort
#20. 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
#21. Culture is a product of law. And laws create norms for society. This is why anyone who wants to change the culture of a country must try to change the norms of the country.
Myles Munroe
#22. So long as society is founded on injustice, the function of the laws will be to defend injustice. And the more unjust they are the more respectable they will seem.
Anatole France
#23. A war on cops? Then the question becomes who are they warring with? Because if you look at the prison system you can tell who the Prisoners of War are. The Black Man. Words are powerful and we must stop these divisive words that tare our country further apart instead of bringing us together.
Bobby F. Kimbrough Jr.
#24. Control in modern times requires more than force, more than law. It requires that a population dangerously concentrated in cities and factories, whose lives are filled with cause for rebellion, be taught that all is right as it is.
Howard Zinn
#25. Redefining marriage will have huge implications for what is taught in our schools, and for wider society. It will redefine society since the institution of marriage is one of the fundamental building blocks of society. The repercussions of enacting same-sex marriage into law will be immense.
Keith O'Brien
#27. I think people are frustrated in this society, where predators prey upon normal, law-abiding citizens, and you never see justice in the courtroom. In my films, the predators don't get away with it.
Steven Seagal
#28. A new education from birth onwards must be built up. Education must be reconstructed and based on the law of nature and not on the preconceived notions and prejudices of adult society.
Maria Montessori
#29. The Federalist Society is changing the culture of our nation's law schools. You are returning the values and concepts of law as our founders understood them to scholarly dialogue, and through that dialogue, to our legal institutions.
Ronald Reagan
#30. Marriage is treated by all civilized societies as a peculiar and favored contract. It is in its origin a contract of natural law ... It is the parent, and not the child of society; the source of civility and a sort of seminary of the republic.
Joseph Story
#31. In the state of nature ... all men are born equal, but they cannot continue in this equality. Society makes them lose it, and they recover it only by the protection of the law.
Baron De Montesquieu
#32. Every single American - gay, straight, lesbian, bisexual, transgender - every single American deserves to be treated equally in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of our society. It's a pretty simple proposition.
Barack Obama
#33. A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high range of human possibilities.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#34. Through the centuries, men of law have been persistently concerned with the resolution of disputes in ways that enable society to achieve its goals with a minimum of force and maximum of reason.
Archibald Cox
#35. Why are the police REALLY having trouble recruiting officers - especially Black officers? We have to bridge the gap between community and law enforcement.
Bobby F. Kimbrough Jr.
#36. The law is the anchor of our feelings. If the law holds our feelings well, it directs our feelings well. If however, the laws fails to hold our feelings well, our feelings become free enough for us to do what we feel freely
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#37. Liberty is indeed little less than a name, where the Government is too feeble to withstand the enterprises of faction, to confine each member of society within the limits prescribed by the law, and to maintain all in the secure and tranquil enjoyme
George Washington
#38. Every man is under the natural duty of contributing to the necessities of the society; and this is all the laws should enforce on him.
Thomas Jefferson
#39. While corporations dominate society and write the laws, each advance in technology is an opening for them to further restrict its users.
Richard Stallman
#40. A theory deeply etched in our law [is that] a free society prefers to punish the few who abuse the rights of free speech after they break the law rather than to throttle them and all others beforehand.
Clarence Thomas
#41. Was I a criminal? No. I was a good member of society. Only my society and the one making the laws are different.
Owsley Stanley
#42. Collectivism answers: The power of society is unlimited. Society may make any laws it wishes, and force them upon anyone in any manner it wishes.
Ayn Rand
#43. As, for the safety of society, we commit honest maniacs to Bedlam, so judges should be withdrawn from their bench, whose erroneous biases are leading us to dissolution. It may indeed injure them in fame or in fortune; but it saves the republic, which is the first and supreme law.
Thomas Jefferson
#44. Chaos is the law of nature, order is the dream of man ...
Anonymous
#45. Legislation and adjudication must follow, and conform to, the progress of society.
Abraham Lincoln
#46. Society will be obeyed; if you refuse obedience, you must take the consequences. Society has only one law, and that is custom. Even religion itself is socially powerful only just so far as it has custom on its side.
Philip Gilbert Hamerton
#47. Resolved, That all laws which prevent women from occupying such a station in society as her conscience shall dictate, or which place her in a position inferior to that of man, are contrary to the great precept of nature, and therefore of no force or authority.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#48. To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law - a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security.
Walter M. Miller Jr.
#49. I do not believe in genetic causes; I am miles away from there. I believe rather that all people who embrace our [european] values, our laws and our constitution are full members of our society.
Geert Wilders
#50. Obedience, as it regards the social relations, the rules of society, and the laws of nature and nature's God, should commence at the cradle and end only at the tomb.
Hosea Ballou
#51. During the first seven years, every society tries to condition the mind - and conditioning means nothing but hypnosis: forcing authority, law, tradition, religion, scripture, the priest, the church, into the innermost unconscious of the child so that from there you can control him.
Rajneesh
#52. I've always been tremendously interested in criminal law. It goes to a deep interest I have in prisons and the criminal element, and what we do as a society with it. I've always been touched by the idea of criminality.
Elizabeth Strout
#53. That the equalization of property exercises an influence on political society was clearly understood even by some of the old legislators. Laws were made by Solon and others prohibiting an individual from possessing as much land as he pleased;
Aristotle.
#54. Most of Roosevelt's innovations have been the law of the land for 70 years now, and yet we are still a free society free enough, that is, to allow tens of thousands of protesters to gather on the National Mall and to broadcast their slogans and speeches to the world via C-SPAN.
Thomas Frank
#55. Each individual of the society has a right to be protected by it in the enjoyment of his life, liberty, and property, according to standing laws.
John Adams
#56. Whether between man and women, man and man, or woman and woman; look not towards any system that binds society created by man for guidance, but be guided by the principles of love. Love is the only law that commands this universe, and is the only language that is understood universally.
Forrest Curran
#57. I am not here as a public official, but as a citizen of a troubled world who finds hope in a growing consensus that the generally accepted goals of society are peace, freedom, human rights, environmental quality, the alleviation of suffering, and the rule of law.
Jimmy Carter
#58. This is the way a civilized society begins to devour itself. By allowing our political leaders and law enforcement officials to scapegoat one segment of our population - to turn innocent people into targets of suspicion, into the enemy - we demean all that is good and decent about our nation.
Arsalan Iftikhar
#59. Bombs know no ism but barbarism. The laws that successfully govern a peaceful and democratic society do not interfere with the only law bombs know, which is the law of gravity.
Clare Boothe Luce
#60. Human society is the embodiment of changeless laws which the whimsicalities and circumstances of men and women involve and overwrap. The realm of literature is the realm of these accidental manners and humours
a spacious realm; and the true literary artist concerns himself mainly with them.
James Joyce
#61. Society having ordained certain customs, men are bound to obey the law of society, and conform to its harmless orders.
William Makepeace Thackeray
#62. I shall support the law, for the law gentlemen, is the firm and solid basis of civil society, the guardian of liberty, the protection of the innocent, the terror of the guilty, and the scourge of the wicked.
Charles Lawrence
#63. I think Frankie Valli did everything right. He kept singing. And you also have to remember, he was confined to a certain society, which was this sort of like - the wrong side of the law kind of society of Italian guys from the streets of Belleville, New Jersey. So he found his way.
John Lloyd Young
#64. Courts of law, and all the paraphernalia and folly of law cannot be found in a rational state of society.
Robert Owen
#65. The American people do not want people thumbing their nose at the law. It undercuts the very fabric of our society and the system of civil justice and of criminal justice as well.
Ernest Istook
#66. These are the now-endangered markers of a civilized society: legally ordained minimum wages, child labor laws, workers safety and compensation laws, pure foods and safe drugs, Social Security, Medicare and rules that promote competitive markets over monopolies and cartels.
Bill Moyers
#67. The actual and potential harm of use of the drug is not great enough to justify intrusion by the criminal law into private behavior, a step which our society takes only 'with the greatest reluctance'.
Raymond P. Shafer
#68. I am proud to say that the Federalist Society was founded in part at the University of Chicago, and one of its best characteristics has been an attack on liberal shibboleths by looking at real consequences and specific problems and by asking what law actually does.
Cass Sunstein
#69. The contempt for law and the contempt for the human consequences of lawbreaking go from the bottom to the top of American society.
Margaret Mead
#70. Natural rights [are] the objects for the protection of which society is formed and municipal laws established.
Thomas Jefferson
#71. The law of nature is alternation for evermore. Each electrical state superinduces the opposite. The soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#72. These "doyennes of society" were no different at bottom than the leading dames among the gossips of her own village. Within that little "society," their word was law, and the law was respectability.
Mercedes Lackey
#73. You cannot make men good by law: and without good men you cannot have a good society. That is why we must go on to think of the second thing: of morality inside the individual.
C.S. Lewis
#74. 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
#75. The glory of justice and the majesty of law are created not just by the Constitution - nor by the courts - nor by the officers of the law - nor by the lawyers - but by the men and women who constitute our society - who are the protectors of the law as they are themselves protected by the law.
Robert Kennedy
#76. The time will come when all people will view with horror light way in which society and its courts of law now take human life; and when that time comes, the way will be clear to device some better method of dealing with poverty and ignorance and their frequent byproducts, which we call crime.
Clarence Darrow
#77. The laboring man and the trade-unionist, if I understand him, asks only equality before the law. Class legislation and unequal privilege, though expressly in his favor, will in the end work no benefit to him or to society.
William Howard Taft
#78. The good society is marked by a high degree of order, justice, and freedom. Among these, order has primacy: for justice cannot be enforced until a tolerable civil social order is attained, nor can freedom be anything better than violence until order gives us laws.
Russell Kirk
#79. We stand in the shadow of Jefferson who believed that a society founded upon the rule of law and liberty was dependent upon public education and the diffusion of knowledge.
Matt Blunt
#80. I have found that life persists in the midst of destruction and, therefore, there must be a higher law than that of destruction. Only under that law would a well-ordered society be intelligible and life worth living.
Mahatma Gandhi
#81. Justice is the tolerable accommodation of the conflicting interests of society, and I don't believe there is any royal road to attain such accommodation concretely.
Learned Hand
#82. It would seem, then, to be the part of political wisdom to found government on property; and to establish such distribution of property, by the laws which regulate its transmission and alienation, as to interest the great majority of society in the protection of the government.
Daniel Webster
#83. Classifications and distinctions based on race or color have no moral or legal validity in our society. They are contrary to our constitution and laws.
Thurgood Marshall
#84. Therefore, to teach them [women] at least an outline of economics and law is the first requirement after giving them a general education. Figuratively speaking, it will be like providing the women of civilized society with a pocket dagger for self-protection.
Fukuzawa Yukichi
#85. For having been educated in a convent, she knew nothing of the customs or manners of the world; and found it difficult to understand that among a people piquing themselves on their liberty, it was the custom to shut a man up in perpetual confinement, to enable him to pay his debts.
Charlotte Turner Smith
#86. The freedom enjoyed in Western society under the rule of law and constitutional government explains both the quality of its civilization and its wealth.
Paul Johnson
#87. It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.
Frederic Bastiat
#88. Let there be then no coercion established in society, and the common law of gravity prevailing, the sexes will fall into their proper places.
Judith Sargent Murray
#89. Modern society includes three types of men who can never think very highly of the world
the priest, the physician, and the attorney-at-law. They all wear black, too, for are they not in mourning for every virtue and every illusion?
Honore De Balzac
#90. Every right has its responsibilities. Like the right itself, these responsibilities stem from no man-made law, but from the very nature of man and society. The security, progress and welfare of one group is measured finally in the security, progress and welfare of all mankind.
Lewis B. Schwellenbach
#91. Anytime you live in a society supposedly based upon law and it doesn't enforce its own laws because the color of a man's skin happens to be wrong, then I say those people are justified to resort to any means necessary to bring about justice when the government can't give them justice.
Malcolm X
#92. Same-sex marriage would eliminate entirely in law the basic idea of a mother and a father for every child. It would create a society which deliberately chooses to deprive a child of either a mother or a father.
Keith O'Brien
#93. As history has repeatedly suggested, nothing is more effective for demolishing traditional legal protections than the combined claims that a crime is uniquely dangerous, and that those behind it have exceptional powers of resistance. [On witchburning in France during the 16th Century.]
Sarah Bakewell
#94. After 25-plus years as a lawyer, prosecutor, and defense attorney, I have developed a deep appreciation for both the wisdom of the law and the role that jurists play in framing the rights and responsibilities that define our society.
Eliot Spitzer
#95. They can make no law which will not have its full operation on themselves and their friends, as well as on the great mass of the society.
James Madison
#96. The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society.
Thomas Jefferson
#97. The Constitution was framed fundamentally as a bulwark against governmental power, and preventing the arbitrary administration of punishment is a basic ideal of any society that purports to be governed by the rule of law.
William J. Brennan
#98. Persuade your fellow citizens it's a good idea and pass a law. That's what democracy is all about. It's not about nine superannuated judges who have been there too long, imposing these demands on society.
Antonin Scalia
#99. In any event, any person from 2.0 down on the Tone Scale should not have, in any thinking society, any civil rights of any kind, because by abusing those rights he brings into being arduous and strenuous laws which are oppressive to those who need no such restraints.
L. Ron Hubbard
#100. The natural inequality of the two powers of population and of production in the earth, and that great law of our nature which must constantly keep their efforts equal, form the great difficulty that to me appears insurmountable in the way to the perfectibility of society.
Thomas Malthus
