Oscar Wilde Quotes

The function of the law is not to provide justice or to preserve freedom. The function of the law is to keep those who hold power, in power.

Law is that which commands what is right and prohibits what is wrong.

Can law, human law, change the nature of things? Can it turn darkness into light, or evil into good? By no means. Notwithstanding ten thousand laws, right is right, and wrong is wrong still. There must still remain an essential difference between justice and injustice, cruelty and mercy. … Who can reconcile this treatment of the Negroes, first and last, with either mercy or justice?

Prisons are built with stones of Law, brothels with bricks of Religion.

If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.

One with the law is a majority.

I'm in prison. But my heart and mind is free. Gangsta haters on the streets are doing more time than me. They need 30 police escorts with them every time they walk down the street.

The more laws, the less justice.

The law is cruel.

As a lawyer, as a private citizen, you see a lot of injustice. You see a lot of people who should have been punished and are not, and people who were punished wrongfully are not vindicated. Fiction is sort of a way to set the record straight, and let people at least believe that justice can be achieved and the right outcomes can occur.

Judging from the main portions of the history of the world, so far, justice is always in jeopardy.

Anyone who does not follow the laws of Rome will suffer the same fate as my brother.

There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime - namely, repressive justice.

Much law, but little justice.

Much law, but no justice.

Where there are the most laws, there is the most injustice. Summum jus, summa injuria.

The victim to too severe a law is considered as a martyr rather than a criminal.

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

The magistrate has the right to enforce what he thinks, and he who is conscious of the truth has a right to suffer.

Law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.

The law has no claim to human respect; its only purpose is to protect exploitation.

Since all people do not do their duty and some, on the contrary, commit injustices, for the sake of keeping order in society, injustices and all enterprises against this order must be repressed: which was possible only through authority given to some over others, and which made government necessary.

I Burchard, bishop of the church of Worms, on account of the strenuous lamentations of the wretched, and the frequent schemes of those many people who tear like dogs at the familia of St. Peter, imposing various laws on them and oppressing the weaker among them by their judgments; with the advice of the clergy and knights and the whole familia I have ordered that these laws be written down, so that no advocate or agent or official or any other person among them may impose on the familia anything new; rather, let it be known before everyone that there is one and the same law, common to rich and poor alike.

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.