Lawful Society Quotes

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

The good society is marked by a high degree of order, justice, and freedom. Among these, order has primacy: for justice cannot be enforced until a tolerable civil social order is attained, nor can freedom be anything better than violence until order gives us laws.

The business of the law is to make sense of the confusion of what we call human life—to reduce it to order but at the same time to give it possibility, scope, even dignity.

The principal foundations of all states are good laws and good arms; and there cannot be good laws where there are not good arms.

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

Torture goes against the very soul of our country. We are a democracy, established on the rule of law.

For in a government of laws and not of men, no man, however prominent or powerful, and no mob however unruly or boisterous, is entitled to defy a court of law. If this country should ever reach the point where any man or group of men by force or threat of force could long defy the commands of our court and our Constitution, then no law would stand free from doubt, no judge would be sure of his writ, and no citizen would be safe from his neighbors.

We live in a society of laws. Why do you think I took you to all those Police Academy movies? For fun? Well, I didn't hear anybody laughing, did you?

If you want to have a society where people are respected and respect laws, you can't have somebody at the top who demeans every group that he talks about.