George Washington Quotes

No law is quite appropriate for all.

The language of the law must not be foreign to the ears of those who are to obey it.

People must live with the laws that we make.

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

Congress, rather than administrative agencies should fashion any policy that is not only of great economic importance but also one that has divided the faiths and loyalties of classes 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.

One-half of the people of this nation to-day are utterly powerless to blot from the statute books an unjust law, or to write there a new and a just one.

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

A fair question could be posed in this fashion: If people are not obeying existing laws, what makes us think they would obey any new laws?

An act of Congress is binding upon all as much as if it were included … in the Constitution itself.

Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by example. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.

The submission of free people to the executive authority of government, is no more than a compliance with laws which they themselves have enacted.

I should prefer to see incorporated into the Constitution a guarantee of universal suffrage; as we cannot get the required two-thirds for that, I cordially support this proposition as the next best

The country don’t need no legislation

His laws, whoso marks them well, are deep, and not vulgar; not made upon the spur of a particular occasion for the present, but out of providence of the future, to make the estate of his people still more and more happy; after the manner of the legislators in ancient and heroical times.

In effect, to follow, not to force, the public inclination,—to give a direction, a form, a technical dress, and a specific sanction, to the general sense of the community, is the true end of legislation.

[The] fundamental principal of all just legislation [is] that the legislature shall not take the property of A and give it to B.

What the lawmaker has to ascertain is not the true belief but the common belief.

The main product of government is laws.

Our whole system of self-government will crumble either if officials elect what laws they will enforce or citizens elect what laws they will support.

In all political regulations, good cannot be complete, it can only be predominant.

When Congress writes a good law, then there are fewer lawsuits trying to interpret it.

Order is said to exist where the people of the country have, as a general rule, ceased to prosecute their quarrels by private force, and acquired the habit of referring the decision of their disputes and the redress of their injuries to the public authorities.

The influence of every mode of thinking which is shared by numbers ought to be felt in the legislature.

Law that is sufficiently complex is indistinguishable from lawlessness.