Top 57 Unjust Law Quotes
#1. 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.
#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.
#4. A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of Saint Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law.
Martin Luther
#5. If an unjust law is passed and enforced, then anyone coerced to comply with the law is a victim of injustice.
R.C. Sproul
#7. An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so.
Mahatma Gandhi
#8. An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#10. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#11. Those who deny the right of a jury to protect an individual in resisting an unjust law of the government, deny him all defence whatsoever against oppression.
Lysander Spooner
#12. Obeying an unjust law is itself unjust.
Ryan North
#13. 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.
#15. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#17. When I refuse to obey an unjust law, I do not contest the right of the majority to command, but I simply appeal from the sovereignty of the people to the sovereignty of mankind.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#18. The horror with which blind and unjust law regards an action never attaches to the doer in the eyes of those who love him.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#19. 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
#20. A statute that lets some wrongfully convicted individuals seek restitution but denies that right to others is an unjust and unequal application of the law.
Eric Schneiderman
#21. 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
#22. while the law permits the Americans to do what they please, religion prevents them from conceiving, and forbids them to commit, what is rash or unjust." He
Eric Metaxas
#23. 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
#24. Again, a law may be both constitutional and expedient, and yet may be administered in an unjust and unfair way.
Abraham Lincoln
#25. 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
#26. There comes a time when a moral man can't obey a law which his conscience tells him is unjust.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#27. Prayer is of no avail. The lightning falls on the just and the unjust in accordance with natural laws.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#28. An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law
Martin Luther King Jr.
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. If the poor, for example, because they are more in number, divide among themselves the property of the rich,- is not this unjust? . this law of confiscation clearly cannot be just.
Aristotle.
#32. 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
#33. As long as the superstition that people should obey unjust laws exists, so long will slavery exist
Mahatma Gandhi
#34. 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
#35. If every man who passed an unjust judgment on his fellow should be condemned, how many judges would be found so vain and foolish as to review and condemn their Maker's work?
Clarence Darrow
#36. There is no justice in following unjust laws.
Aaron Swartz
#37. [N]o American should retreat an inch on the right of jurors to acquit if they perceive the law or its administration to be unjust.
Charley Reese
#38. 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.
#39. I answer, Socrates, that rhetoric is the art of persuasion in courts of law and other assemblies, as I was just now saying, and about the just and unjust.
Gorgias
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.
Max Stirner
#44. Forgetfulness is a property of all action. The man of action is also without knowledge: he forgets most things in order to do one, he is unjust to what is behind him, and only recognizes one law - the law of that which is to be.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#45. 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
#46. To this war of every man against every man, this also in consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law, where no law, no injustice. Force, and fraud, are in war the cardinal virtues.
Thomas Hobbes
#47. 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
#48. The Judge does not make the law. It is people that make the law. Therefore if a law is unjust, and if the Judge judges according to the law, that is justice, even if it is not just.
Alan Paton
#50. Proscription, martial law, the billeting of the rude troops, the tax collector, the unjust judge, anything at all, is sweeter than responsibility.
Mary McCarthy
#51. Any law which violates the inalienable rights of man is essentially unjust and tyrannical; it is not a law at all.
Maximilien Robespierre
#52. Of the unjust rights which in virtue of this ceremony an iniquitous law gives me over the person and property of another, I cannot legally, but I can morally, divest myself.
Robert Dale Owen
#53. 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.
#54. Unjust laws have to be fought ideologically; they cannot be fought or corrected by means of mere disobedience and futile martyrdom.
Ayn Rand
#55. Anyone in a free society where the laws are unjust has an obligation to break the law.
Henry David Thoreau
#56. The law which attempts a man's life [capital punishment] is impractical, unjust, inadmissible. It has never repressed crime
for a second crime is every day committed at the foot of the scaffold.
Marquis De Sade
#57. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.
Martin Luther King Jr.
