Archive

Quotes

A functioning police state needs no police.

—William S. Burroughs, 1959

Petty laws breed great crimes.

—Ouida, 1880

It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me.

—Martin Luther King Jr., 1962

If we do not maintain justice, justice will not maintain us.

—Francis Bacon, 1615

War has silenced all laws.

—Lucan, c. 65

However harmless a thing is, if the law forbids it, most people will think it wrong.

—W. Somerset Maugham, 1896

Law makes long spokes of the short stakes of men.

—William Empson, 1928

Everything that has wings is beyond the reach of the law.

—Joseph Joubert, 1791

The law’s made to take care o’ raskills.

—George Eliot, 1860

No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law.

—Emma Goldman, 1917

The more corrupt the state, the more numerous its laws.

—Tacitus, c. 110

If law and justice do not attain their ends, the people will be unable to move hand or foot.

—Confucius, c. 500

All moanday, tearsday, wailsday, thumpsday, frightday, shatterday till the fear of the Law.

—James Joyce, 1939