A functioning police state needs no police.

—William S. Burroughs, 1959

Petty laws breed great crimes.

—Ouida, 1880

Law makes long spokes of the short stakes of men.

—William Empson, 1928

War has silenced all laws.

—Lucan, c. 65

An unjust law is no law at all.

—Saint Augustine, 395

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

The law is established from above but becomes custom below.

—Su Zhe, c. 1100

To live outside the law, you must be honest.

—Bob Dylan, 1966

Better no law than no law enforced.

—Danish proverb

All law is of necessity defective in the beginning.

—Han Yu, c. 800

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

—W. Somerset Maugham, 1896

Kings and fools know no law.

—German proverb

No law is sufficiently convenient to all.

—Roman proverb

Avoid the law—the first loss is generally the least.

—Hannah Farnham Sawyer Lee, 1844

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

—Confucius, c. 500

The law is far, the fist is near.

—Korean proverb

Laws, like houses, lean on one another.

—Edmund Burke, 1765

To make laws that man cannot and will not obey serves to bring all law into contempt.

—Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1860

The greatest veneration one can show the law is to keep a watch on it.

—Nadine Gordimer, 1971

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

—James Joyce, 1939

Resorting to the law to resolve a dispute is a declaration of spiritual bankruptcy.

—Quentin Crisp, 1984

The law looks at no one’s face.

—Gabriel Okara, 1964

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

—Francis Bacon, 1615

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

—Tacitus, c. 110

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

—George Eliot, 1860

When law can do no right,
Let it be lawful that law bar no wrong.

—William Shakespeare, c. 1594

The law makes ten criminals where it restrains one.

—Voltairine de Cleyre, 1890

In a court of fowls, the cockroach never wins its case.

—Rwandan proverb

Necessity knows no law except to conquer.

—Publilius Syrus, c. 50 BC

We are to go to law never to revenge, but only to repair.

—Samuel Pepys, 1661

It is better to live unknown to the law.

—Irish proverb

The more laws, the more lawbreakers.

—Tao Te Ching, c. 500 BC

Let us have peace, but let us have liberty, law, and justice first.

—Frederick Douglass, 1878

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.

—Aleister Crowley, 1904

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

—Joseph Joubert, 1791

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

—Emma Goldman, 1917

Good men must not obey the laws too well.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844

Curse on all laws but those which love has made.

—Alexander Pope, 1717