Learned Hand Quotes

Be you never so high the law is above you.

We Mexicans believe in the force of the law, not in the law of force

There is no king where there is no law.

What is going to rule our great commonwealth, the mob or the law?

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.

In our country the law of the strong does not prevail. The strength of the law prevails.

Law hath dominion over all things, over universal mind and matter ;, For there are reciprocities of rights, which no creature can gainsay.

In all governments, there must of necessity be both the law and the sword; laws without arms would give us not liberty, but licentiousness; and arms without laws, would produce not subjection, but slavery. The law, therefore, should be unto the sword what the handle is to the hatchet; it should direct the stroke and temper the force.

I know no human being exempt from the law. The law is the security of the people of England; it is the security of every person that is governed, and of every person that governs.

Laws are maintained in credit, not because they are essentially just, but because they are laws. It is the mystical foundation of their authority; they have none other.

Whenever men take the law into their own hands, the loser is the law. And when the law loses, freedom languishes.

If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.

If there are people who act outside the law, then the state must use legal means to impose law in the interests of majority. That's the way it's done in the U.S., and that's the way it's done in Russia.

A rule of law is superior to a rule of force.

Law is largely crystallized custom.

One of the damnable unhappy conditions of life is sometimes Government has to make people be civil.

Anyone who takes it upon himself ... to break a bad law, thereby authorizes everyone else to break the good ones.

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

The king ought not to be under any man, but under God and under the law, for the law makes the king. Rex non debet esse sub homine sed sub Deo et lege, quia lex facit regem.

Law … is but words and paper without the hands and swords of men

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

Nothing is so faulty as those laws which correct faults. He who obeys them because they are just obeys a justice which is imaginary and not the essence of law; it is quite self-contained, it is law and nothing more.

Law. Law. That is what saves nations from the most imminent dangers.

The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.

We cannot expect people to have respect for law and order until we teach respect to those we have entrusted to enforce those laws.