Louis Stokes Quotes

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

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.

...no bloody or unbloody change of society can eradicate the evil in man: as long as there will be men, there will be malice, envy and hatred, and hence there cannot be a society which does not have to employ coercive restraint.

I know of no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution

The laws of most countries are far worse than the people who execute them, and many of them are only able to remain laws by being seldom or never carried into effect.

The greater the number of laws and enactments, the more thieves and robbers there will be.

Make the law and then find a way around it.

The real scandal is not what ’s illegal, but what’s legal.

Foreign agents are taking advantage of loopholes in our laws.

There are loopholes big enough to drive trucks through. And Congress needs to take a look at those laws and make sure that they're much more rigorous.

The great can protect themselves, but the poor and humble require the arm and shield of the law.

China has not established the rule of law and thus there is no justice.

… we are seeing too much in the world today of an effort to regulate too minutely by law the lives and morals of whole groups of people.

While a law is in force it should be lived up to. You have a right to try to change it, and if you can persuade the majority that it should be changed then it will be changed. But you must abide by a law until it is changed or you will be flouting the fundamental things that make us a democracy and a law-abiding nation.

At some point the law must prevail and the lawyers must go home.

We are sometimes up against a flat refusal to apply this law rigidly. One People's Judge told me flatly that he could never bring himself to throw someone in jail for stealing four ears. What we're up against here is a deep prejudice, imbibed with their mother's milk... a mistaken belief that people should be tried in accordance not with the Party's political guidelines but with considerations of "higher justice”.

The NSA has shown, time and time again, it will seize on any wiggle room in the law .

The Dutch public has always been accustomed to being treated according to the letter of the law.

If we don’t enforce the regulations we have, these conversations are useless.

God forbid that the defendant should not be allowed the benefit of every advantage he is entitled to by law.

One of the main goals of the reforms is to broaden the rights of Mexicans. We needed a standard criminal code, the same rule of law all over the country. Instead of having different laws in every state, there will be the same law all over the country — at the federal and the local level — for any criminal procedure.

[In America] there is no end to the laws and no beginning to the execution of them.

Here we have a protest law. This law does not prevent protests but regulates them.

Some Republicans are good, and some Republicans are bad. Some Democrats are good, and some Democrats are bad. There are good police, and there are bad police. There are good black people and bad black people. There are good white people and bad white people.

The problem is that we have evil people who try to skirt the laws. And that's the problem.