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Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Age of Enlightenment10 quotes
Where-ever Law ends, Tyranny begins. — John Locke · 1690Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way to the common feelings of mankind. — Edward Gibbon · 1776Laws, like houses, lean on one another. — Edmund Burke · 1760Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen. — George Savile, Lord Halifax · 1750Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law. — Oliver Goldsmith · 1764All presumptive evidence of felony should be admitted cautiously; for the law holds, that it is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer. — William Blackstone · 1769All 10 quotes →Classical antiquity6 quotes
Laws are silent in time of war. — Cicero · 52 BCEven when laws have been written down, they ought not always to remain unaltered. — Aristotle · 350 BCWritten laws are like spiders' webs; they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor, but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful. — AnacharsisThere is a written and an unwritten law. The one by which we regulate our constitutions in our cities is the written law; that which arises from custom is the unwritten law. — Diogenes Laertius · 240The people must fight in defense of the law as they would for their city wall. — HeraclitusAnacharsis laughed at Solon for imagining the dishonesty and covetousness of his countrymen could be restrained by written laws, which were like spiders' webs, and would catch, it is true, the weak and poor, but easily be broken by the mighty and rich. — Anacharsis · 119The Renaissance3 quotes
The chief foundations of all states, new as well as old or composite, are good laws and good arms; and as there cannot be good laws where the state is not well armed, it follows that where they are well armed they have good laws. — Niccolo Machiavelli · 1532Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to bid restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work. — John Milton · 1644We must not make a scarecrow of the law,
Setting it up to fear the birds of prey,
And let it keep one shape till custom make it
Their perch and not their terror. — William Shakespeare · 1616Early Christianity1 quote
A law that is not just does not seem to me to be a law. — St. Augustine · 389Middle Ages1 quote
No freeman shall be taken, or imprisoned, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any way harmed, nor will we go upon him nor will we send upon him, except by the legal judgment of his peers or by the law of the land. — Magna Carta · 1215