Legality Quotes

It is more informative how we treat things with no defined legal rights, than how we treat things with legal rights.

Liberty is not something a government gives you. It is a right that no government can legally take away.

Guantánamo Bay's motto: 'Safe, humane, legal, transparent detention.' Four adjectives describing one sick joke.

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.

The Supreme Court of the United States is no longer a court of law. It is a forum of legal fad and fashion.

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.

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.

It is possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard.

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

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

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.

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

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 passionately love liberty, legality, respect for rights, but not democracy. That is what I find in the depth of my soul.

Alexis de Tocqueville

You can't learn everything you need to know legally.