Top 32 Quotes About Unjust Laws
#2. 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.
#3. 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.
#4. A military force, at the command of Congress, can execute no laws, but such as the people perceive to be just and constitutional; for they will possess the power, and jealousy will instantly inspire the inclination, to resist the execution of a law which appears to them unjust and oppressive.
Noah Webster
#5. 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.
#6. Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless.
Isaiah
#7. We, unlike Nazi Germany or Mussolini's Italy, have never stopped being a nation of laws, not of men. But witness how men with motives and a majority can manipulate law to cruel and unjust ends.
Robert Byrd
#8. Just as it is the duty of all men to obey just laws, so it is the duty of all men to disobey unjust laws.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#9. The laws of man are made only to be broken, because they are stupid and unjust.
Dennis Wheatley
#10. Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators. Your wealth has been stripped of you by unjust men ... The people of Baghdad shall flourish under institutions which are in consonance with their sacred laws.
Frederick Stanley Maude
#12. A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law. Who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up the state's segregation laws was democratically elected?
Martin Luther King Jr.
#13. Unjust laws have to be fought ideologically; they cannot be fought or corrected by means of mere disobedience and futile martyrdom.
Ayn Rand
#14. Anyone in a free society where the laws are unjust has an obligation to break the law.
Henry David Thoreau
#15. Peer pressure must never be an influence on us. Nor should unjust rules or laws have any effect on us. What is right must always be done.
Abbot George Burke
#16. Just because someone gets arrested doesn't mean what they are doing is wrong. Some laws are unfair and unjust.
Tim Robbins
#17. Nothing could be more grotesquely unjust than a code of morals, reinforced by laws, which relieves men from responsibility for irregular sexual acts, and for the same acts drives women to abortion, infanticide, prostitution, and self-destruction.
Suzanne La Follette
#18. We have the means to change the laws we find unjust or onerous. We cannot, as citizens, pick and choose the laws we will or will not obey.
Ronald Reagan
#19. 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
#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. The sea does not belong to despots. Upon its surface men can still exercise unjust laws, fight, tear one another to pieces, and be carried away with terrestrial horrors. But at thirty feet below its level, their reign ceases, their influence is quenched, and their power disappears.
Jules Verne
#22. Prayer is of no avail. The lightning falls on the just and the unjust in accordance with natural laws.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#24. If anything had or could have a value equal to gold and silver, it would require no tender law; and if it had not that value it ought not to have such a law; and, therefore, all tender laws are tyrannical and unjust and calculated to support fraud and oppression.
Thomas Paine
#25. 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
#26. Laws don't limit freedom. Laws insure the freedoms of the majority. Laws are unjust when they serve to put the majority of the people at the mercy of an aggressive, hostile minority.
Northern Adams
#27. Our political way of life is by the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God, and of course presupposes the existence of God, the moral ruler of the universe, and a rule of right and wrong, of just and unjust, binding upon man, preceding all institutions of human society and government.
John Quincy Adams
#28. We have a responsibility to disobey and violate unjust rules and laws.
Bryant McGill
#29. As long as the superstition that people should obey unjust laws exists, so long will slavery exist
Mahatma Gandhi
#30. Without the ability to criticize unjust laws in powerful symbolic ways, we can't change them. And the point of a democracy is that people should be able to convince other people to change a law.
Marvin Ammori
#31. Peaceful civil disobedience to unjust laws, which I support with every fiber of my being, can sometimes be necessary at any level of government. It falls upon the people, in the last resort, to stand against injustice no matter where it occurs.
Ron Paul
#32. There is no justice in following unjust laws.
Aaron Swartz
