David Hume Quotes

The attempt to treat politics as a branch of the profession of law [has] the disadvantage of refining issues to a point which no large society could comprehend.

Societies cannot move forward without law, and our constitution is the cornerstone of the law and our National Assembly is its umbrella and fortress.

The government has a responsibility to protect society, to help maintain society. That's why we have laws... The rule of law creates a set of standards for our behavior.

The first duty of law is to keep sound the society it serves

A fixed rule may give rise to occasional deviations from justice; but these amount to nothing more than the price which every member of the community may be called upon to pay for the advantage of an enlightened code. No laws can be framed sufficiently comprehensive to embrace the infinite varieties of human action …

Laws themselves, political Constitutions, are not our Life; but only the house wherein our Life is led.

I don't want to have anything to do with the government. And yet if we don't have any regulations, there goes civilization, there goes security, and there goes protecting you against what people are going to sell you.

Saudi Arabia has stability. The social contract and the political contract between the king and the rulers and the royal family and the ruled people in Saudi Arabia is very strong and the bondage is so solid.

Society cannot exist without law. Law is the bond of society: that which makes it, that which preserves it and keeps it together. It is, in fact, the essence of civil society.

The difference between the departments undoubtedly is, that the legislature makes, the executive executes, and the judiciary construes the law.

Constitutions are but paper; society is the substratum of government.

A free and civilized society uses its constitution as a countermeasure to its self-destructive impulses.

The law is the last result of human wisdom acting upon human experience for the benefit of the public.

to negative all laws passed by the several States, contravening in the opinion of the National Legislature the articles of Union.

Whatever the People has last ordained shall be held as binding by law.

The body-politic is formed by a voluntary association of individuals: It is a social compact, by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good. It is the duty of the people, therefore, in framing a Constitution of Government, to provide for an equitable mode of making laws, as well as for an impartial interpretation, and a faithful execution of them; that every man may, at all times, find his security in them.

An act of the Congress of the United States... which assumes powers... not delegated by the Constitution, is not law, but is altogether void and of no force

We find the people to be no better than their laws.

Any legal system developed by the human community, being as it is a fruit of historical development, carries a seal of limitation and imperfection.

Laws are always unstable unless they are founded on the manners of a nation; and manners are the only durable and resisting power in a people.

Good laws lead to the making of better ones; bad ones bring about worse.

In reality there are two, and only two, foundations of law; and they are both of them conditions without which nothing can give it any force: I mean equity and utility.

The first duty of a state is to provide for its own conservation. Until that point is secured, it can preserve and protect nothing else. But, if possible, it has greater interest in acting according to strict law than even the subject himself. For if the people see that the law is violated to crush them, they will certainly despise the law. They, or their party, will be easily led to violate it, whenever they can, by all the means in their power. Except in cases of direct war, whenever government abandons law, it proclaims anarchy.

How a constitution is written can sometimes matter almost as much as what it contains.

Laws are often made to express collective ethical principles, to establish a climate of opinion …