Chaim Weizmann Quotes

It is true that legality is not morality, and sticking to the law is necessary for good citizenship, but it is not sufficient.

Good laws make it easier to do right and harder to do wrong.

There is respect for law, and then there is complicity in lawlessness.

Nothing is so faulty as those laws which correct faults. He who obeys them because they are just obeys a justice which is imaginary and not the essence of law; it is quite self-contained, it is law and nothing more.

Goddammit. Yeah, I have. First, there's a huge difference between being arrested and being guilty. Second, see, the law changes and I don't. How I stand vis-à-vis the law at any given moment depends on the law. The law can change from state to state, from nation to nation, from city to city. I guess I have to go by a higher law. How's that? Yeah, I consider myself a road man for the lords of karma.

Is everything right because the law allows it?

The man who does not know the nature of the Law, cannot know the nature of sin.

It would not be correct to say that every moral obligation involves a legal duty; but every legal duty is founded on a moral obligation.

In a republic the first rule for the guidance of the citizen is obedience of the law.

The best laws cannot make a constitution work in spite of morals; morals can turn the worst laws to advantage.

Law never made men a whit more just.

If a man sets out to study all the laws, he will have no time left to transgress them.

I do not believe in lawyers, in that mode of attacking or defending a man, because you descend to meet the judge on his own ground, and, in cases of the highest importance, it is of no consequence whether a man breaks a human law or not. Let lawyers decide trivial cases.

So many laws argues so many sins.

The law, that is what makes men stay honest.

Justice is the handmaiden of truth, and when truth dies, justice is buried with it.

Let reverence for the laws . . . become the political religion of the nation.

Justice is the great interest of man on earth.

Justice renders to every one his due.

The law can seem remote, arcane, the stuff of specialists. But it isn't, because for those of us who live in democracies, the law begins with us.

The Law ... is perfection of reason.

The recognition of the sanctity of the life of every man is the first and only basis of all morality.

Moses is the keystone to every man's ethical code. He was the first man of record in history to conceive of the law as separate from the will of a ruler, to choose whether a man should live by grace of law, or law by grace of man. In a literal sense Moses lives at every council table today.

Liberty is the essential basis, the sine qua non, of morality.

We have never stopped sin by passing laws; and in the same way, we are not going to take a great moral ideal and achieve it merely by law.