Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

The law cannot save those who deny it but neither can the law serve any who do not use it. The history of injustice and inequality is a history of disuse of the law.

The people become more observant of justice, and do not refuse to submit to the laws when they see them obeyed by their enactor.

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. Law. That is what saves nations from the most imminent dangers.

I just want everybody to follow the law.

Where there's no law, there's no bread.

Legislation may at times be disobeyed, but never law, for the breaking brings swift punishment of its own.

The law, that is what makes men stay honest.

Criminal justice is about respecting the law and being respected by the law so there is a fundamental respect issue here.

Law in general is human reason, inasmuch as it governs all the inhabitants of the earth: the political and civil laws of each nation ought to be only the particular cases in which human reason is applied.

One with the law is a majority.

Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.

The acid test of any legal system is not the greatness or the grandeur of its ideal concepts, but whether, in fact, it is able to produce order and justice.

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

The law is not a 'light' for you or any man to see by; the law is not an instrument of any kind. The law is a causeway upon which so long as he keeps to it a citizen may walk safely.

Preventing the arbitrary administration of punishment is a basic ideal of any society that purports to be governed by the rule of law.

What is going to rule our great commonwealth, the mob or the law?

The business of the law is to make sense of the confusion of what we call human life—to reduce it to order but at the same time to give it possibility, scope, even dignity.

If you will not enforce the law, I will.

Nobody is allowed to break the law.

We will always obey the law. We will follow the rule of law.

Law and freedom must be indivisible partners. For without law, there can be no freedom, only choas and disorder; and without freedom, law is but a cynical veneer for injustice and oppression.

We must be governed by the force of law, not by the law of force.

Justice is merely incidental to law and order. Law and order is what covers the whole picture. Justice is part of it, but it can't be separated as a single thing.

Two types of people laugh at the law: those that break it and those that make it.