Written on the Heart: Some Thoughts on the Law

Rather than share my thoughts on law I figured it might be better to ponder the words of some other, more learned, people. I like these quotes because most of them seem to hint at what Jesus meant about fulfilling the law. However, they often they seem to be suggesting that what we call The Law is not doing a good job of holding up God’s Law.

Do any of these words resonate with you? Or, on the other hand, which ones do you think are off base?

Perhaps you have a quotation or thought on law that you would like to share.

If you have ten thousand regulations you lose all respect for the law. Winston Churchill

You cannot make good men by law and without good men you cannot have a good society. C.S. Lewis

This is a court of law young man, not a court of justice. Oliver Wendell Holmes

Every law is an infraction of liberty. Jeremy Bentham

It would be better to have no laws at all, than to have too many. Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

When men are pure, laws are useless; when men are corrupt, laws are broken. Benjamin Disraeli

Good men must not obey the laws too well. Ralph Waldo Emerson

The law is reason, free from passion. Aristotle

We eagerly get hold of a law that serves as a weapon to our passions. Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Certainly one of the highest duties of the citizen is a scrupulous obedience to the laws of the nation. But it is not the highest duty. Thomas Jefferson

Laws and institutions, like clocks, must occasionally be cleaned, wound up, and set to true time. Henry Ward Beecher

It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important. Martin Luther King Jr.

It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for law, so much as a respect for right. Henry David Thoreau

Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them. Henry Louis Mencken

I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either. Alexander Solzhenitsyn

In a state where corruption abounds, laws must be very numerous. Publius Cornelius Tacitus

There is but one law for all, namely that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity — the law of nature and of nations. Edmund Burke

Democracy is not the law of the majority but the protection of the minority. Albert Camus

Justice that love gives is a surrender, justice that law gives is a punishment. Mohandas Gandhi

No law or ordinance is mightier than understanding Plato

Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through. Jonathan Swift

Sacrifice, which is the passion of great souls, has never been the law of societies. Henri Frederic Amiel

And here is one more for the sake of perspective and perhaps a little irony. Abbas has been a leader of the PNA, PLO and Fatah;

We have one authority and one law and everyone has the responsibility to follow that law and that authority. Mahmoud Abbas