The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings capable of law, where there is no law, there is no freedom.

- John Locke

An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so.

- Mohandas K. Gandhi

An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

- Carrie Chapman Catt

Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.

- Truman Capote

Just think -- guns have a constitutional amendment protecting them and women don't.

- Eleanor Smeal

Until the infallibility of human judgment shall have been proved to me, I shall persist in demanding the abolition of the death penalty.

- Marquis de Lafayette

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.

- Thomas Jefferson

The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly.

- Abraham Lincoln

The world presents enough problems if you believe it to be a world of law and order; do not add to them by believing it to be a world of miracles.

- Louis D. Brandeis

Whether humanity will consciously follow the law of love, I do not know. But that need not disturb me. The law will work just as the law of gravitation works, whether we accept it or not. The person who discovered the law of love was a far greater scientist than any of our modern scientists. Only our explorations have not gone far enough and so it is not possible for everyone to see all its workings.

- Mohandas K. Gandhi

If... the machine of government... is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.

- Henry David Thoreau

There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.

- Albert Einstein

The death penalty is reserved for people who do not have enough money to defend themselves.

- Paul Simon

Laws for the liberal education of youth, especially for the lower classes of people, are so extremely wise and useful that to a humane and generous mind, no expense for this purpose would be thought extravagant.

- John Adams

The moral law commands us to make the highest possible good in a world the final object of all our conduct.

- Paul Ricoeur

That only a few, under any circumstances, protest against the injustice of long-established laws and customs, does not disprove the fact of the oppressions, while the satisfaction of the many, if real only proves their apathy and deeper degradation.

- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

The purpose of democracy -- supplanting old belief in the necessary absoluteness of establish'd dynastic rulership, temporal, ecclesiastical, and scholastic, as furnishing the only security against chaos, crime, and ignorance -- is, through many transmigrations, and amid endless ridicules, arguments, and ostensible failures,

- Walt Whitman

There is no man so good, who, were he to submit all his thoughts and actions to the laws, would not deserve hanging 10 times in his life.

- Michel de Montaigne

If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.

- Abigail Adams

In this house, we OBEY the laws of thermodynamics!

- Homer Simpson

Law and justice are not always the same. When they aren't, destroying the law may be the first step toward changing it.

- Gloria Steinem

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

- Earl Warren

The dignity of man requires obedience to a higher law, to the strength of the spirit.

- Mohandas K. Gandhi

I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

- Thomas Jefferson

No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.

- Thomas Jefferson