Italian Proverb Quotes

The minute the law is devised, its evasion is contrived.

The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science, that smiles in your face while it picks your pocket

The law is like a string, fixed at both ends but with a great deal of play in it — very loose, the line of the law — so you can stretch it this way or that, rearrange the arc of it so you are nearly always — short of blatant theft or cold-blooded murder — safely on the right side. That's a daunting thing to realize but true.

After taking advantage of the weakness, the credulity and the ignorance of the weakest and the most ignorant of the people, those sly, cunning politicians easily had them believe whatever they wanted. Consequently, they made them accept with respect and submission, willingly or not, all the laws they wanted to establish.

A technicality I'm prepared to hide wildly behind.

The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool.

As readers, we sense when the game is being played for real and when something else is afoot: pride, showmanship, the pursuit of power, self-aggrandizement, revenge, making money. Not that there's anything wrong with any of that, but I dislike closing a book with the sense that I've been had.

I know how easy it is for one to stay well within moral, ethical, and legal bounds through the skillful use of words - and to thereby spin, sidestep, circumvent, or bend a truth completely out of shape. To that extent, we are all liars on numerous occasions.

No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

Everybody has the ability to be manipulative, to be hateful and deceitful.

There's a lot of conning as part of our society, I think.

The law will never keep up with the machinations of the human mind.

Laws are only words written on paper, words that change on society's whim and are interpreted differently daily by politicians, lawyers, judges, and policemen. Anyone who believes that all laws should always be obeyed would have made a fine slave catcher. Anyone who believes that all laws are applied equally, despite race, religion, or economic status, is a fool.

Among the several cloudy appellatives which have been commonly employed as cloaks for misgovernment, there is none more conspicuous in this atmosphere of illusion than the word Order.

The law is solely made for the exploitation of those who do not understand it.

Flatter them with hopes until I be ready to suppress them.

Who profits from this? Cui bono?

Intricate and involved rules of procedure have become the refuge of both big and little criminals. There is a belief abroad that by invoking technicalities, subterfuge, and delay, the ends of justice may be thwarted by those who can pay the cost.

We are ruled by public opinion, not by statute law.

All kings of England had ever, in cases of necessity or expediency, been accustomed, at intervals, to elude them [the laws.]

The priest accustoms the child to the idea of law, to make it obey better what he calls the "divine law," and the lawyer prates of divine law, that the civil law may be the better obeyed.

You can hire logic, in the shape of a lawyer, to prove anything that you want to prove.

There never was a law yet made, I conceive, that hit the taste exactly of every man, or every part of the community; of course, if this be a reason for opposition, no law can be executed at all without force

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

… all governments must frequently infringe the rules of justice to support themselves; that truth must give way to dissimulation, honesty to convenience, and humanity itself to the reigning interest. The whole of this mystery of iniquity is called the reason of state. It is a reason which I own I cannot penetrate.