Niccolo Machiavelli Quotes

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

In any society that is governed by the rule of law, some form of morality is always imposed. It's inescapable.

Societies depend on agreed rules.

As laws are necessary that good manners may be preserved, so good manners are necessary that laws may be maintained.

We all must follow the rule of law, not the rule of aldermen.

The law, that is what makes men stay honest.

For as laws are necessary that good manners be preserved, so there is need of good manners that law may be maintained.

I'm leery of legislative solutions to what is morality.

The Law is one aspect of a much more concrete and encompassing relation than the relation between commanding and obeying that characterizes the imperative.

To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.

We have one authority and one law and everyone has the responsibility to follow that law and that authority.

You can't legislate morality.

Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.

Laws should be like clothes. They should be made to fit the people they serve.

If man asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous.

Law is largely crystallized custom.

Law is order, and good law is good order.

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

It is not your great father who does this; but the laws of the country, which he and every one of his people is bound to regard.

Law is the strongest link between man and freedom.

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.

The world is governed much more by opinion than by laws. It is not the judgment of courts, but the moral judgment of individuals and masses of men, which is the wall of defense around property and life.

We find the people to be no better than their laws.

The law exists to express our values.

Laws or ordinances unobserved, or partially attended to, had better never have been made.