Legality Quotes

“It is possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard.”
― Hermann Hesse

“You can't learn everything you need to know legally.”
― John Irving, A Widow for One Year

“It surprises me, though it shouldn't, how short the memories of these politicians are. They forget the brutal lengths women have gone to in order to terminate pregnancies when abortion was illegal or when abortion is unaffordable. Women have thrown themselves down stairs and otherwise tried to physically harm themselves to force a miscarriage. Dr. Waldo Fielding noted in the New York Times, "Almost any implement you can imagine had been and was used to start an abortion—darning needles, crochet hooks, cut-glass salt shakers, soda bottles, sometimes intact, sometimes with the top broken off." Women have tried to use soap and bleach, catheters, natural remedies. Women have historically resorted to any means necessary. Women will do this again if we are backed into that terrible corner. This is the responsibility our society has forced on women for hundreds of years.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist

“All laws which can be violated without doing any one any injury are laughed at. Nay, so far are they from doing anything to control the desires and passions of men that, on the contrary, they direct and incite men's thoughts the more toward those very objects, for we always strive toward what is forbidden and desire the things we are not allowed to have. And men of leisure are never deficient in the ingenuity needed to enable them to outwit laws framed to regulate things which cannot be entirely forbidden... He who tries to determine everything by law will foment crime rather than lessen it.”
― Baruch Spinoza

“The law does not expect a man to be prepared to defend every act of his life which may be suddenly and without notice alleged against him.”
― John Marshall

“Morality and legality have nothing to do with one another. I'm more than fine with breaking a law if it disagrees with my values and morals.”
― Ashly Lorenzana

“I have read of a gentleman who owned a so fine house in London, and when he went for months of summer to Switzerland and lock up his house, some burglar came and broke window at back and got in. Then he went and made open the shutters in front and walk out and in through the door, before the very eyes of the police. Then he have an auction in that house, and advertise it, and put up big notice; and when the day come he sell off by a great auctioneer all the goods of that other man who own them. Then he go to a builder, and he sell him that house, making an agreement that he pull it down and take all away within a certain time. And your police and other authority help him all they can. And when that owner come back from his holiday in Switzerland he find only an empty hole where his house had been. This was all done en règle; and in our work we shall be en règle too. We shall not go so early that the policemen who have then little to think of, shall deem it strange; but we shall go after ten o’clock, when there are many about, and such things would be done were we indeed owners of the house.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“Liberty is not something a government gives you. It is a right that no government can legally take away.”
― A.E. Samaan

“Rules, whether they govern sexual morality or financial probity, regardless of whether they are justifiable or undesirable, always provoke bold recalcitrants to devise clever, defiant ways to breach them.”
― Richard Davenport-Hines, An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo

“The Supreme Court of the United States is no longer a court of law. It is a forum of legal fad and fashion.”
― A.E. Samaan

“Our fights must be rooted in experiences, in stories, and in anecdotes. People remember these more than sterile numbers or facts. Myths are powerful magic and can turn enemies into friends. In a world where too many still tell stories that some are illegal and that to be free we must control the movement of others, the work of making new myths is essential.”
― Syed Khalid Hussan, Undoing Border Imperialism

“What did “good government” really mean? Langlie and his brotherhood promised an end to political corruption. (There’s no evidence that Langlie ever even took a drink, much less a bribe.) The days of “honest graft” were over, at least for a while. But seen from another perspective—that of ordinary citizens without access to Langlie and Abram’s elite network—Langlie didn’t so much end corruption as legalize it. Langlie wasn’t opposed to a government organized around the interests of the greedy; he just didn’t want to have to break the law to serve them.”
― Jeff Sharlet, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power

“So many times the debate of abortion turns to legality. The issue is not legality, the issue is morality. Have you not forgotten? It was legal for Adolf Hitler to place all of those men, women, and children in concentration camps and murder them. Abortion should never be an issue of legality, it is most definitely an issue of morality.”
― Derrick Sanderson

“Guantánamo Bay's motto: 'Safe, humane, legal, transparent detention.' Four adjectives describing one sick joke.”
― Rodney Ulyate

“Quid leges sine moribus vanae proficiunt?”
― Horace, Odes III: Dulce Periculum

“Well, there are some of us who believe in justice instead of legal technicalities.”
― Sally Berneathy, Death by Chocolate

“Legal and illegal does not necessarily mean good and bad or right and wrong. It simply means that some men in power got together and decided that certain things are “right” while others are “wrong”. So it is largely a matter of perspective; and perspectives tend to change over time.

As such, there seem to be man-made laws from one side and — timeless, universal, almost unwritten — Spiritual laws from another. Assisted by our own logic, reason and morality, us cosmic, visiting travellers who are made of stardust and who happen to be citizens of the Earth for some decades can choose to be guided by the Spiritual laws.”
― Omar Cherif

“I named one of my ducks Lawton, but I regret that, because that’s a ton of law. I’m not sure I like 2,000 pounds of legality. That seems like 1,999 pounds too much.”
― Jarod Kintz, Music is fluid, and my saxophone overflows when my ducks slosh in the sounds I make in elevators.

“It is more informative how we treat things with no defined legal rights, than how we treat things with legal rights.”
― Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life

“I don't care about legal. Is it wise?”
― Allan Dare Pearce, Paris in April

“I passionately love liberty, legality, respect for rights, but not democracy. That is what I find in the depth of my soul.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville

“Of course, bad and illegal are not necessarily synonymous.”
― Sally Berneathy, Death by Chocolate

“The acts most heinous are not strictly crimes per se, they include crimes masquerade as legalities enforced by personnel who are apathetic to humanity.”
― Et Imperatrix Noctem

“Zale steepled their fingers.
“Do you want to talk about that?”
“Not particularly.”
“All right. But you know, I am a priest. It’s sort of what we do. Talk to people. Take confessions. That sort of thing.”
“I thought you were more concerned with legal matters.”
― T. Kingfisher, Swordheart

“Illegality is covered by an illusion of legality.”
― Steven Magee

“The illegality of police officers is covered by an illusion of legality by police internal affairs.”
― Steven Magee

“You sabotage any chance at arriving at “equity” if you compromise or debase the bedrock concept of “equality before the law.”
― A.E. Samaan

“How long?’
‘As long as it takes. Your time will be best spent acquiring a gift appropriate to the illegality of what you’ve asked me to do. Now go away.”
― Jodi Taylor, Santa Grint

“You can’t be a person without a birthday, they seemed to say.”
― Tara Westover, Educated