Sermon quotes on laws
John Adams
It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished.
The Portable John Adams
Henry Ward Beecher
It usually takes a hundred years to make a law; and then, after it has done its work, it usually takes a hundred years to get rid of it.
Life Thoughts (1858)
Edmund Burke
Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.
Winston S. Churchill
If you make 10,000 regulations you destroy all respect for the law.
In the Balance: Speeches 1949 and 1950 (Houghton Mifflin, 1952).
Martin Luther King Jr.
It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.
From an address to Cornell College, Mount Vernon, Iowa in 1962.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless.
Martin Luther
A unjust law, is no law at all.
Bibelausgaben, Die Bibel nach der Übersetzung Martin Luthers, mit Apokryphen, Neue Rechtschreibung, Schwarz
James Madison
No man can be a competent legislator who does not add to an upright intention and a sound judgment a certain degree of knowledge of the subjects on which he is to legislate.
Ovid (attributed)
The purpose of the law is to prevent the strong from always getting their way.
Theodore Roosevelt
The cornerstone of this Republic, as of all free government, is respect for and obedience to the law. Where we permit the law to be defied or evaded, whether by rich man or poor man, by black man or white, we are by just so much weakening the bonds of our civilization and increasing the chances of its overthrow, and of the substitution therefore of a system in which there shall be violent alternations of anarchy and tyranny.
Ken Sande
The courts have been expected to fill the void created by the decline of church, family and neighborhood unity.
The Peacemaker, Baker Publishing Group.
Jonathan Swift
Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.
Tacitus
When the state is most corrupt, then laws are most multiplied.
Annals III (btw AD 115 and 120)
Alexis de Tocqueville
Laws are always unstable unless they are founded upon the manners of a nation; and manners are the only durable and resisting power in a people.
Hammurabi
Hammurabi, the exalted prince, who feared God, to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak.
The Code of Hammurabi (ca. 1780 BC), Avalon Project, Yale Law School
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