Jodi Picoult Quotes

What's stronger-the need to uphold the law, or the motive to turn one's back on it?

Only literature could reveal the process of breaking the law - without which the law would have no end - independently of the necessity to create order.

Laws can only be as effective as the willingness of people to obey them.

Those who challenge the law in one or another of its aspects weaken the whole legal structure of society. For one man to disobey a law he does not like is to invite others to disobey another law which he may regard as indispensable to his own livelihood - or life.

Criminals don't care what the law is.

We have a society now where obedience to the law is really a choice, an option only.

I have a moral position against the death penalty. But I took an oath of office to uphold it. Following an oath of office is also a moral obligation.

We are a nation of laws, and breaking those laws have consequences.

What is law? Is it what is on the books, or what is actually enacted and obeyed in a society? Or is law what must be enacted and obeyed, whether or not it is on the books, if things are to go right?

The Judge does not make the law. It is people that make the law. Therefore if a law is unjust, and if the Judge judges according to the law, that is justice, even if it is not just.

Absolute freedom mocks at justice. Absolute justice denies freedom.

Laws are maintained in credit, not because they are essentially just, but because they are laws. It is the mystical foundation of their authority; they have none other.

It is great sin to swear unto a sin, But greater sin to keep a sinful oath.

Identify the moral dilemma driving the novel. the successful novel will haunt a reader because it deals with some ethical or moral dilemma that makes the reader wonder what he or she would do in the protagonist's place.

When honor and the Law no longer stand on the same side of the line, how do we choose[?]

No society can exist if respect for the law does not to some extent prevail; but the surest way to have the laws respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality are in contradiction, the citizen finds himself in the cruel dilemma of either losing his moral sense or of losing respect for the law, two evils of which one is as great as the other, and between which it is difficult to choose.

I am doing the right thing, he told himself, so why do I feel so bad?

I tried to walk a line between acting lawfully AND testifying falsely, but I now realize that I did not fully accomplish that goal.

Nothing so upholds the laws as the punishment of persons whose rank is as great as their crime.

The death penalty makes us all murderers.

To this day I don’t know if he was struggling with the moral implications of gunning down half a dozen civilians, or if he was mentally counting to see if he had that many shells left in the gun.

Even if a civil society were to be dissolved by the consent of all its members (e.g., if a people inhabiting an island decided to separate and disperse throughout the world), the last murderer remaining in prison would first have to be executed, so that each has done to him what his deeds deserve and blood guilt does not cling to the people for not having insisted upon this punishment; for otherwise the people can be regarded as collaborators in his public violation of justice.

The essential function of the State is to maintain peace, justice, law, and order, and to protect the individual citizen against aggression, violence, theft, and fraud.

Is it not a terrible thing to be forced by society to do things which all of us as individuals regard as abominable crimes?

Are we not also married to conscience which we would love to get rid of often enough since it is more bothersome than a man or a woman ever could become?