Quotes to inspire and reflect

The opinion of all lawyers, the unanimous cry of the nation, and the good of the state, are in themselves a law.

It ain’t no sin if you crack a few laws now and then, just so long as you don’t break any.

Let all the laws be clear, uniform, and precise; to interpret laws is almost always to corrupt them.

It never occurred to any Enlightenment figure in the eighteenth century that law was not preferable to man.

Lawyers love paper. They eat, sleep and dream paper. They turn paper into gold, and their files are colorful and their language neoclassical and calligraphically bewigged.

Good laws lead to the making of better ones; bad ones bring about worse.

Law was once introduced without reason, and has become reasonable.

Wherever law ends, tyranny begins.

The law is the last result of human wisdom acting upon human experience for the benefit of the public.

Our nation is founded on the principle that observance of the law is the eternal safeguard of liberty and defiance of the law is the surest road to tyranny.

Those who are too lazy and comfortable to think for themselves and be their own judges obey the laws. Others sense their own laws within them.

The people should fight for their law as for their city wall.

Every new time will give its law.

The more laws, the more offenders.

Give a wise man an honest brief to plead / and his eloquence is no remarkable achievement.

Law cannot persuade where it cannot punish.

People say law but they mean wealth.

A just cause needs no interpreting. / It carries its own case. But the unjust argument / since it is sick, needs clever medicine.

Our statute is a currency which we stamp with our own' portrait.

Anyone who takes it upon himself, on his private authority, to break a bad law, thereby authorizes everyone else to break the good ones.

All bad precedents began as justifiable measures.

Laws that only threaten, and are not kept, become like the log that was given to the frogs to be their king, which they feared at first, but soon scorned and trampled on.

A legal broom’s a moral chimney-sweeper, / And that’s the reason he himself s so dirty.

Litigant, n. A person about to give up his skin for the hope of retaining his bones.

Good laws, if they are not obeyed, do not constitute good government.

Whereas the law is passionless, passion must ever sway the heart of man.

We laugh and laugh. Then cry and cry— / Then feebler laugh, Then die.

Wrong must not win by technicalities.

The mad also laugh, or is that what Freud and the others discovered perhaps, that only the mad laugh?

The laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms—hollow, heartless, mirthless, maniacal.

We are in the world to laugh. In purgatory or in hell we shall no longer be able to do so. And in heaven it would not be proper.

Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps.

In laughter all that is evil comes together, but is pronounced holy and absolved by its own bliss.

Not by warth does one loll but by laughter.

He who laughs best to-day, will also laugh last.

One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.

A laugh’s the wisest, easiest answer to all that’s queer.

You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humour teaches tolerance.

Pain is deeper than all thought; laughter is higher than all pain.

Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.

Sudden glory is the passion which maketh those grimaces called laughter.

If one were required to increase the dramatic seriousness of his face in relation to the seriousness of the problems he had to confront, he would quickly petrify and become his own statue.

Mirth is the Mail of Anguish.

A human being should beware how he laughs, for then he shows all his faults.

[W]hile the laughter of joy is in full harmony with our deeper life, the laughter of amusement should be kept apart from it. The danger is too great of thus learning to look at solemn things in a spirit of mockery, and to seek in them opportunities for exercising wit.

The man who cannot laugh is not only fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils; but his whole life is already a treason and a stratagem.

[0]f all the countless folk who have lived before our time on this planet not one is known in history or in legend as having died of laughter.

The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.