Law Quotes

Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

Time, space, and natural law hold for me suggestions of intolerable bondage, and I can form no picture of emotional satisfaction which does not involve their defeat—especially the defeat of time, so that one may merge oneself with the whole historic stream and be wholly emancipated from the transient and the ephemeral.

It must be remembered that there is no real reason to expect anything in particular from mankind; good and evil are local expedients—or their lack—and not in any sense cosmic truths or laws.

It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.

Where there is a free government, and the people make their own laws by their representatives, I see no injustice in their obliging one another to take their own paper money.

There should be a law that no ordinary newspaper should be allowed to write about art. The harm they do by their foolish and random writing it would be impossible to overestimate – not to the artist but to the public, blinding them to all, but harming the artist not at all.

The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise man sees in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws.

The law will never make a man free; it is men who have got to make the law free.

The law is a lie, and through it men lie most shamelessly.

So the lion is the law-breaker. Just as to the primitive man the lion is the lawbreaker, the great nuisance, dangerous to human beings and to animals, that breaks into the Kraal at night and fetches the bull out of the herd: he is the destructive instinct.

Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.[Le talion est de l’ordre de la nature et de l’instinct, il n’est pas de l’ordre de la loi. La loi, par définition, ne peut obéir aux mêmes règles que la nature.]

Nature does not break her own laws.