Nick Harkaway Quotes

Law is the ultimate science.

Right... is the child of law.

The study of law can be disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality; a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have power--and that all too often seeks to explain, to those who do not, the ultimate wisdom and justness of their condition. But that's not all the law is. The law is also memory; the law also records a long-running conversation, a nation arguing with its conscience.

If a man sets out to study all the laws, he will have no time left to transgress them.

And the law, that is the perfection of reason, cannot suffer anything that is inconvenient.

I'm not interested in culture; I'm interested in the law.

Law is not a science, but is essentially empirical.

There is nothing certain in the principles of jurisprudence.

Bad facts make bad law.

Every object and purpose of justice is effectually answered, and every supposed inconvenience is effectually rebutted by the law as it stands.

I told him that I thought it was law logic - an artificial system of reasoning, exclusively used in Courts of justice, but good for nothing anywhere else.

The Law ... is perfection of reason.

Law is par excellence the thing that wants a reason. Now the only possible way of accounting for the laws of nature, and for uniformity in general, is to suppose them results of evolution.

Law is no explanation of anything; law is simply a generalization, a category of facts. Law is neither a cause, nor a reason, nor a power, nor a coercive force. It is nothing but a general formula, a statistical table.

Law is nothing else but the best reason of wise men applied for ages to the transactions and business of mankind.

Laws, in their most general signification, are the necessary relations derived from the nature of things.

The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science.

Law, in its most general and comprehensive sense, signifies a rule of action; and is applied indiscriminately to all kinds of action, whether animate, or inanimate, rational or irrational. Thus we say, the laws of motion, of gravitation, of optics, or mechanics, as well as the laws of nature and of nations. And it is that rule of action, which is prescribed by some superior, and which the inferior is bound to obey.

Law it is . . . which hears without ears, sees without eyes, moves without feet and seizes without hands.

All human laws are, properly speaking, only declaratory; they have no power over the substance of original justice.

Laws are subordinate to custom.

I still don't like authority exercised without reason. But they laugh at you at Cambridge if you say that sort of thing. For them, the law is a system of rules not that different from mathematics.

The criterion of constitutionality is not whether we believe the law to be for the public good.

Law is largely crystallized custom.

The law has to be, in part, a teacher.