Victor Cousin Quotes

Those terrifying verbal jungles called laws are simply such directives, accumulated, codified, and systematized through the centuries.

Law is largely crystallized custom.

A government of laws without men is as visionary as a government of men without laws.

Laws, in their most general signification, are the necessary relations derived from the nature of things.

Then a lawyer said, But what of our laws, master? And he answered: 'You delight in laying down laws. Yet you delight more in breaking them.

The most celebrated system of jurisprudence known to the world begins, as it ends, with a Code.

It is the merit of the common law that it decides the case first and determines the principles afterward.

Preventing the arbitrary administration of punishment is a basic ideal of any society that purports to be governed by the rule of law.

The lawyers want to govern us by the common law of England. Trust me for it, common sense is a much safer guide for us.

As long as the law exists, there will be morality.

There is nothing certain in the principles of jurisprudence.

A good law is one that holds, whether you recognize it or not; a bad law is one that cannot, however much you ordain it.

Bad facts make bad law.

Laws aren't ghosts in this country, they walk around with the smell of earth on them.

We are a country of laws.

Every object and purpose of justice is effectually answered, and every supposed inconvenience is effectually rebutted by the law as it stands.

Law is error, you see. It's an attempt to write down a lot of things everyone ought to know anyway.

Wise laws and just restraints are to a noble nation not chains, but chains of mail, -- strength and defense, though something of an incumbrance.

I am further of opinion that it would be better for us to have [no laws] at all than to have them in so prodigious numbers as we have.

Englishmen are said to love their laws; - that is the reason, I suppose, they give us so many of them, and in different editions.

And the law, that is the perfection of reason, cannot suffer anything that is inconvenient.

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 …

The best [legal] codes extant, if malignantly criticized, will be found to furnish matter for censure in every page …

… the magistrate should know what law he is to administer, that the subject should know under what law he is to live.