Edmund Burke Quotes

That which is not just, is not Law; and that which is not Law, ought not to be obeyed.

In the state of nature profit is the measure of right.

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

Politicians may do as they please, so long as they violate no rule of right, no principle of justice, no law of God; but in no world, in no order, or condition, have men the right to do wrong.

The law is immoral.

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

Although the legal and ethical definitions of right are the antithesis of each other, most writers use them as synonyms. They confuse power with goodness, and mistake law for justice

The right of the inventor to his discovery, the right of the poet to his inspiration, depends upon those principles of eternal justice, which God has implanted in the heart of man.

Law and Equity [justice] which God hath joined, but which man has put asunder.

The secular law has as its task not to turn the world lying in evil into the Kingdom of God, but to prevent it from turning into hell.

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.

Law is not law, if it violates the principles of eternal justice.

In reality there are two, and only two, foundations of law; and they are both of them conditions without which nothing can give it any force: I mean equity and utility.

If laws are just properties of objects, how can those laws continue to operate when the object is not really there?

That's what law is: educated guesses at right and wrong.

That is one of the Law's purposes, of course: to test the qualities of those who choose to employ it.

...Perses, hear me out on justice, and take what I have to say to heart; cease thinking of violence. For the son of Kronos, Zeus, has ordained this law to men: that fishes and wild beasts and winged birds should devour one another, since there is no justice in them; but to mankind he gave justice which proves for the best.

Law is error, you see. It's an attempt to write down a lot of things everyone ought to know anyway.

Justice renders to every one his due.

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.

The Law ... is perfection of reason.

The industrial and social injustice of our era is the tragic aftermath of democracy's overemphasis on freedom as the "right to do whatever you please." No, freedom means the right to do what you ought, and ought implies law, and law implies justice, and justice implies God. So too in war, a nation that fights for freedom divorced from justice has no right to war, because it does not know why it wants to be free, or why it wants anyone else to be free.

Right... is the child of law.

The law, that is what makes men stay honest.

Ordinary human laws are the means - however imperfect - by which we express our understanding of the enduring moral law.