Quotes & Sayings About Legal

Leave it to you to find a legal way to do something illegal — Diana Palmer

All the legal action I've taken against newspapers has had a massively positive effect on my life and achieved exactly what I wanted, which is privacy and non-harassment. — Sienna Miller

In the world of contract killings, there is no arbitration. — Kenneth Eade

He resisted for a while and there were some legal boundaries, you know, keeping me from being near him or his family, but in the end, love overcame. And I got what I wanted. I always get what I want ... — Kristen Schaal

When a parliamentary or social majority decrees that it is legal, at least under certain conditions, to kill unborn human life, is it not really making a tyrannical decision with regard to the weakest and most defenseless of human beings? ... While public authority can sometimes choose not to put a stop to something which were it prohibited would cause more serious harm, it can never presume to legitimize as a right of individuals even if they are the majority of the members of society an offense against other persons caused by the disregard of so fundamental a right as the right to life. — Pope John Paul II

The emphasis on the birth of Christ tends to polarize our pluralistic society and create legal and ethnic belligerence. — John Clayton

You're never going to have a legal immigration system that works if you grant amnesty. — Marco Rubio

This initiation ceremony, known as 'signing the Official Secrets Act', has no legal force; everyone is bound by the Act whether they sign the form or not. — Clive Ponting

Joel Bakan, author of The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power argues that if corporations have 'person hood' under the law, then it makes sense to question what kind of people they are. He posits that corporations behave with all the classical signs of sociopathy: they are inherently amoral, they elevate their own interests above all others', and they disregard moral and sometimes legal limits on their behavior in pursuit of their own advancement. Organizations of this type would thrive under the leadership of people who have the same traits: sociopaths. — M.E. Thomas

The Elephantine papyri - written as some of the books of the Bible are being written - is true social and legal documentation, and to historians overwhelmingly powerful and moving, even when ostensibly about trivial things. — Simon Schama

The legal profession, politics and acting are very closely tied: the whole point is to have an idea and get it across to a listener, whether it is one person or five thousand in a hall. — Kevin Spacey

Plato defined a slave as one who accepts from another the purposes which control his conduct. This condition obtains even where there is no slavery in the legal sense. It is found wherever men are engaged in activity which is socially serviceable, but whose service they do not understand and have no personal interest in. — John Dewey

Criminality is now legal. I guess criminal racketeering these days would be like burning little children at the stake or something. That's about what it takes to get anyone to care. — Alex Jones

No civilization would ever have been possible without a framework of stability, to provide the wherein for the flux of change. Foremost among the stabilizing factors, more enduring than customs, manners and traditions, are the legal systems that regulate our life in the world and our daily affairs with each other. — Hannah Arendt

Judith Stacey - a prominent New York University professor who is in no way regarded as a fringe figure, in testifying before Congress against the Defense of Marriage Act - expressed hope that the revisionist view's triumph would give marriage "varied, creative, and adaptive contours . . . [leading some to] question the dyadic limitations of Western marriage and seek . . . small group marriages."44 In their statement "Beyond Same-Sex Marriage," more than three hundred "LGBT and allied" scholars and advocates - including prominent Ivy League professors - call for legally recognizing sexual relationships involving more than two partners.45 University of Calgary Professor Elizabeth Brake thinks that justice requires us to use legal recognition to "denormalize[] heterosexual monogamy as a way of life" and correct for "past discrimination against homosexuals, bisexuals, polygamists, and care networks."46 — Sherif Girgis

One should try to locate power at the extreme of its exercise, where it is always less legal in character. — Michel Foucault

I remember being upset because I was finally legal to drink in Canada, and I decided to throw that all away and move to America, where I had to wait another two years. I came here to do improv and to try to join the Groundlings. — Ryan Reynolds

The true strength of rulers and empires lies not in armies or emotions, but in the belief of men that they are inflexibly open and truthful and legal. As soon as a government departs from that standard it ceases to be anything more than 'the gang in possession,' and its days are numbered. — H.G.Wells

Imagine the disincentive to software development if after months of work another company could come along and copy your work and market it under its own name ... without legal restraints to such copying, companies like Apple could not afford to advance the state of the art. — Bill Gates

Illegal drugs are better for you than the legal stuff. How many artists have created while drunk, high on laudanum, opium, chloral, or amphetamines? What have antidepressants ever done for culture? — Hanif Kureishi

No woman shall have the legal right to bear a child without a permit for parenthood. — Margaret Sanger

When I was fighting, I would look to excite the crowds with a bolo punch or something taunting. Looking back, they were legal - but not sportsmanlike. I don't recommend another boxer try them. But we looked more to make the robot fights dramatic first and realistic second. — Sugar Ray Leonard

Rather to my surprise, I found myself genuinely indignant at the suggestion that murder was to be reintroduced as a means of political advancement for the first time since the Tudors, and even more indignant that the legal and political establishments in all their forms - which included, at that stage, the police - were going to cover up the whole episode. In the event, it turned out that my anxieties were unfounded, as Thorpe was totally innocent of all charges brought against him. — Auberon Waugh

The presumption of innocence is not just a legal concept. In commonplace terms, it rests on that generosity of spirit which assumes the best, not the worst, of the stranger. — Kingman Brewster Jr.

From your confessor, lawyer and physician, hide not your case on no condition. — John Harington

The legal system doesn't work. Or more accurately, it doesn't work for anyone except those with the most resources. Not because the system is corrupt. I don't think our legal system (at the federal level, at least) is at all corrupt. I mean simply because the costs of our legal system are so astonishingly high that justice can practically never be done. — Lawrence Lessig

I am very proud of the role I played in getting legal equality for people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, and in helping get rid of the prejudice by being visible about it, helping to block the conviction of Bill Clinton of impeachment. — Barney Frank

He spits out an epithet so nasty I think it's only legal in England. And then only when your favourite football club loses. — Tera Lynn Childs

I grew up in the South. I grew up in the days of legalized segregation. And, so, whether you called it legal racial segregation or you called it apartheid, it was the same injustice. — Johnnetta B. Cole

Although abortion has been legal nationwide for more than a quarter century, access remains difficult for many women. — David Grimes

I've spent a lot of time in prisons, first doing legal work and later, teaching. — Peter Orner

Yusuf Qaradawi is probably the most well-known legal authority in the whole Muslim world today. — Feisal Abdul Rauf

You can't escape moral judgment through a legal loop hole. — Michael Josephson

Immigrants can spread diseases for which we may have no immunity. There is also the question of crime and culture. Many immigrants come from countries with different legal structures and are not willing to behave in the way we expect American citizens to behave. — Ron Paul

The First Amendment is important not only to guarantee the rights of alternative religions and of nonreligious persons in society; it is also important in setting the only possible legal and social condition for the creative health of serious religion itself. — Langdon Brown Gilkey

The acid test of any legal system is not the greatness or the grandeur of its ideal concepts, but whether, in fact, it is able to produce order and justice. — Lee Kuan Yew

Not that incentives are always so easy to figure out. Different types of incentives - financial, social, moral, legal, and others - push people's buttons in different directions, in different magnitudes. An incentive that works beautifully in one setting may backfire in another. — Anonymous

I went to my library, right? And I started to research the Bill of Rights and I did not technically find anything that said all Americans shall eat shrimp with whoever they like, but I found some things that are close enough to infer that I am within my legal rights to enjoy seafood with whomever I choose. — John Mayer

Liberals don't care. Their approach is to rip out society's foundations without asking if they serve any purpose. Why do we have immigration laws? What's with these borders? Why do we have the institution of marriage, anyway? What do we need standardized tests for? Hey, I like Keith Richards - why not make heroin legal? Let's take a sledgehammer to all these load-bearing walls and just see what happens! — Ann Coulter

If the video camera was loaded with a tape, it was never seen. If Detective Smith made a report of the interview, it was never produced in the legal proceedings that followed. — John Grisham

To use legal or financial constraint to compel either abstention or submission, is entirely horrible, unnatural and absurd. — Aleister Crowley

Extrapolating from the statistical growth of the legal profession, by the year 2035 every single person in the United States will be a lawyer, including newborn infants. — Michael Crichton

Opening our borders to a flood of illegal immigrants is deliberate ... It's time to impeach; and on behalf of American workers and legal immigrants of all backgrounds, we should vehemently oppose any politician on the left or right who would hesitate in voting for articles of impeachment, — Sarah

Being a justice. If you love law the way I do ... you're given the job of a lifetime ... you're permitted to address the most important legal questions of the country, and sometimes the world. And in doing so, you make a difference in people's lives. — Sonia Sotomayor

I believe, assume the power to decide more political than legal issues in nature, the people naturally focus less on the law and more on the lawyers that are chosen really to administer the law. — Sam Brownback

Good lord, look at you!" he cried, delighted at my grubbiness. "What have you been doing? You're filthy!" He looked me up and down admiringly, then said in a more solemn tone: "You haven't been screwing hogs again, have you, Bryson?"
"Ha ha ha."
"They're not clean animals, you know, no matter how attractive they may look after a month on the trail. And don't forget we're not in Tennessee anymore. It's probably not even legal here - at least not without a note from the vet." He patted the chair beside him, beaming all over, happy with his quips. "Come and sit down and tell me all about it. So what was her name - Bossy?" He leaned closely and confidentially. "Did she squeal a lot? — Bill Bryson

I contend the state ought to do its thing and provide legal rights for all couples who want to be joined together for life. The church should bless unions that it sees fit to bless, and they should be called marriages. — Tony Campolo

If my opinion runs more than twenty pages," she said, "I am disturbed that I couldn't do it shorter." The mantra in her chambers is "Get it right and keep it tight." She disdains legal Latin, and demands extra clarity in an opinion's opening lines, which she hopes the public will understand. "If you can say it in plain English, you should," RBG says. Going through "innumerable drafts," the goal is to write an opinion where no sentence should need to be read twice. "I think that law should be a literary profession," RBG says, "and the best legal practitioners regard law as an art as well as a craft. — Irin Carmon

To it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits[1] of the world, and not according to Christ. 9For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, 10and you have been filled in him, who is the head of all rule and authority. 11In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, 12 having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead. 13 And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, 14by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. — Anonymous

More than sixty years ago we instituted floating citizenship, so children of mixed parents would not be compelled to choose between several equal fatherlands. It was not the end of our countries. Almost everyone still prefers to have a homeland to love and return to, and the legal possibility of life without a homeland does not destroy the bonds of culture, language, and history which make a homeland home. — Ada Palmer

Being under the microscope meant I was never given any slack. I still managed to screw up plenty in life, mind you, but in the things I really cared about - the legal work, or the stories I was telling as a writer, or the office I built in government - I wasn't left a lot of margin for error. It's kept me driven. — Ronan Farrow

I've learned that most of gay America is coupled up, or looking to be. No wonder gay marriage has such traction. So many of us are already in it, so of course we want the legal benefits. — Bruce Vilanch

You can't just lecture the poor that they shouldn't riot or go to extremes. You have to make the means of legal redress available. — Harold H. Greene

A system in which legal police shootings of unarmed civilians are a common occurrence is a system that has some serious flaws. In this case, the drawback is a straightforward consequence of America's approach to firearms. A well-armed citizenry required an even-better-armed constabulary. Widespread gun ownership creates a systematic climate of fear on the part of the police. The result is a quantity of police shootings that, regardless of the facts of any particular case, is just staggeringly high. Young black men, in particular, are paying the price for America's gun culture. — Matthew Yglesias

We have a legal system, and this is not something that happens all the time. We have capital punishment. America has capital punishment. Iran has capital punishment. Iran hangs people and leaves their bodies hanging on cranes. Iran put to death more than a thousand people last year. I don't see EU reporting on it. — Adel Al-Jubeir

The Florida Supreme Court wanted all the legal votes to be counted. The United States Supreme Court, on the other hand, did not want all the votes to be counted. — Vincent Bugliosi

It is simply a fact that the birth rate of our illegal immigrants exceeds that of our legal residents. — John Linder

Lawsuits should not be used to destroy a viable and independent distribution system. The solution lies in the marketplace and not the courtroom. — Don Henley

To achieve the impossible, you must attempt the absurd — Jon R. Michaelsen

It's like the commercial, "Once you pop you can't stop." Once you pop a pill, you can't stop. They have you hooked and they know it. Like a drug dealer, they are so happy they have won another loyal customer. Not loyal because you want to be, but loyal because your body is now completely dependent on them and their legal prescription "drugs." — Lisa Bedrick

Ah! believer, it is safer always for you to be led of the Spirit into gospel liberty than to wear legal fetters. Judge yourself at what Christ is rather than at what you are. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

The idea of making the industry live up to its legal responsibility is not going to die. — John M Barry

The pornography of tough-mindedness, covert action, and preparedness for "peace through strength" has had a predictably hypnotic effect on the legislative branch, turning it from legal watchdog to lapdog. — Christopher Hitchens

I'm on a man-fast. Why bother with them? the good ones are always taken. Or they're weirdly uminterested in a capricious wild child with continuous legal problems~ Carrow the Incarcerated — Kresley Cole

In 2001, the Associated Press published a three-part investigation into the theft of black-owned land stretching back to the antebellum period. The series documented some 406 victims and 24,000 acres of land values at tends of millions of dollars. The land was taken through means ranging from legal chicanery to terrorism. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Any court which undertakes by its legal processes to enforce civil liberties needs the support of an enlightened and vigorous public opinion which will be intelligent and discriminating as to what cases really are civil liberties cases and what questions really are involved in those cases. — Robert H. Jackson

To have the opportunity to lead the Solicitor General's office is the honor of a lifetime. As you know, this is an office with a long and rich tradition, not only of extraordinary legal skill but also of extraordinary professionalism and integrity. That is due, in large measure, to the people who have led it. — Elena Kagan

Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny. — Edmund Burke

People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other. — Wendell Berry

We don't really have the ability to enforce the law with respect to illegal work in this country in a way that's truly effective ... We haven't been able to require every employer to enter a system in which they check the work status of their employees and determine whether they're legal, and without that, we don't really have the ability to enforce the law with respect to illegal work in this country in a way that's truly effective. And that would be the single greatest additional weapon we could use if we're serious about tackling this problem. — Michael Chertoff

Every time anybody in Washington talks about legal status, amnesty, anything of that nature, it becomes a magnet that lures people in quickly into the United States. — Louie Gohmert

If you are a millionaire beset by blackmailers or anyone else to whose comfort the best legal advice is essential, and have decided to put your affairs in the hands of the ablest and discreetest firm in London, you proceed through a dark and grimy entry and up a dark and grimy flight of stairs; and, having felt your way along a dark and grimy passage, you come at length to a dark and grimy door. There is plenty of dirt in other parts of Ridgeway's Inn, but nowhere is it so plentiful, so rich in alluvial deposits, as on the exterior of the offices of Marlowe, Thorpe, Prescott, Winslow and Appleby. As you tap on the topmost of the geological strata concealing the ground-glass of the door, a sense of relief and security floods your being. For in London grubbiness is the gauge of a lawyer's respectability. — P.G. Wodehouse

With every book I write, I give the Hera Leick Promise. I will never weave into my stories: cheating; sex outside the main characters; sexual abuse; cliffhangars; years of separation; man whores; and lastly my worst pet peeve, insta-love. If one sneaks in, I give you permission to shoot me. Please make note, however, guns are not legal in England. Neither is murder. I hope. — Hera Leick

Exploration! Exploring the past! We students in the camps seminar considered ourselves radical explorers. We tore open the windows and let in the air, the wind that finally whirled away the dust that society had permitted to settle over the horrors of the past. We made sure people could see. And we placed no reliance on legal scholarship. It was evident to us that there had to be convictions. It was just as evident as conviction of this or that camp guard or police enforcer was only the prelude. The generation that had been served by the guards and enforcers, or had done nothing to stop them, or had not banished them from its midst as it could have done after 1945, was in the dock, and we explored it, subjected it to trial by daylight, and condemned it to shame. — Bernhard Schlink

The history of American democracy, to say the least, has been checkered. Our nation was founded at a time when people of African descent were held in bondage. After slavery was abolished, they were forced to endure legal discrimination for another 100 years. — Bernie Sanders

Our policy is guided by the principle that we will keep unauthorized aliens out of the United States, welcome legal immigrants, and protect refugees from harm. Our solutions rely on working in partnership with States and communities. — William J. Clinton

A faraway-father is distant from his children; not necessarily in geography, but socially - either by choice or by force. Our country has many fathers who are figuratively-forced far and away from their families. Legal force brings to bear disparate dads through such innovations as no-fault divorce, legal precedence, and post-divorce incrimination. I am one of these parents - portrayed or profiled as 'perpetrator'. — H. Kirk Rainer

Seemingly by design, the American legal system encourages defense counsel to be as mendacious as possible. As Monroe Freedman, a legal ethicist and former dean of Hofstra Law School, has written, "The attorney is obligated to attack, if he can, the reliability or credibility of an opposing witness whom he knows to be truthful." It's an essential component of our adversarial system of justice, based on the theory that justice is best achieved not through a third-party investigation directed by an impartial judge but, instead, through vigorous disputation by the interested parties: trial by verbal combat. The — Jon Krakauer

There is cruelty in divorce. There is cruelty in forced or unfortunate marriage. We will continue to cry at weddings because we know how bittersweet, how fragile is the truth. We will always need legal divorce just as an emergency escape hatch is crucial in every submarine. No sense, however, in denying that after every divorce someone will be running like a cat, tin cans tied to its tail: spooked and slowed down. — Anne Roiphe

The problem with legalization is we already have a dependent generation that's subsidized to oblivion. And will legal pot somehow slice another sliver of the population off of the productive world? — Greg Gutfeld

Law always chooses sides on the basis of enforcement power. Morality and legal niceties have little to do with it when the real question is: Who has the clout? — Frank Herbert

I am not saying I will vote against John Ashcroft because he is pro-life, .. But let me say if someone was nominated for attorney general who was vehemently pro choice
who in his or her career spent decades trying to find ways to expand the law abortion at nine months would be perfectly legal
wouldn't you be more upset and raise more of a voice than against a nominee who was simply pro-choice?. — Charles Schumer

The crisis of European jurisprudence began a century ago with the victory of legal positivism. — Carl Schmitt

Haska - a dim legendary figure of a generation ago, who went back up the mountain and cleared six acres of brush in the tiny valley that took his name. He broke the soil, reared stone walls and a house, and planted apple trees. And already the site of the house is undiscoverable, the location of the stone walls may be deduced from the configuration of the landscape, and I am renewing the battle, putting in angora goats to browse away the brush that has overrun Haska's clearing and choked Haska's apple trees to death. So I, too, scratch the land with my brief endeavour and flash my name across a page of legal script ere I pass and the page grows musty. — Jack London

Unfortunately, what many people forget is that judges are just lawyers in robes. — Tammy Bruce

like to see Clay McCann thrown in prison because he doesn't like the idea of a man getting away with murder in his state, despite the weird legal circumstances of this one. — C.J. Box

Wrong cannot have a legal descendant. — Thomas Paine

Thorndyke never forgets a likely case. He is sort of a medico-legal camel. He gulps down the raw facts from the newspapers or elsewhere, and then, in his leisure moments, he calmly regurgitates them and has a quiet chew at them. — R. Austin Freeman

...And unpredictability can spread: one powerful outlier can pave the way for others, and as more states joint the outlier, the foundations of the rule of law begin to crumble.

US counterterrorism practices--and the legal theories that under-pin them--are undermining the international rule of law in precisely this way... — Rosa Brooks

But I also want to give them a pathway so that they can earn citizenship, earn a legal status, start learning English, pay a significant fine, go to the back of the line, but they can then stay here and they can have the ability to enforce a minimum wage that they're paid, make sure the worker safety laws are available, make sure that they can join a union. — Barack Obama

Legal land surveyors are few and far between and can find themselves in demand. — Mark Mason

Marriage is an honorable estate and should not be used simply as an excuse for legal intercourse. — Jasper Fforde

'Network neutrality' is sometimes called 'Internet freedom' or 'Internet openness' and is a legal principle that would forbid cable and phone companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast from blocking some websites or providing special priority to others. — Marvin Ammori

I always drank, from when it was legal for me to drink. And there was never a time for me when the goal wasn't to get as hammered as I could possibly afford to. I never understood social drinking, that's always seemed to me like kissing your sister. — Stephen King

A legal or religious ceremony by which two persons of the opposite sex solemnly agree to harass and spy on each other ... until death do them join. — Elbert Hubbard

Increasingly constructive doubt is the sign of advancing civilization. We must put question marks along many of our inherited legal dogmas, since they are dangerously out of line with social facts. — Jerome Frank

[W]hether it is debates over men sharing housework and child-rearing, the 'crisis' of marriage and behind that the broader crisis of male-female relationships in adjusting to social change, or the increased sympathy for (or at least tolerance of) lesbian and gay demands for equal legal rights, all these developments in heterosexuality are usually approached and conceptualised in piecemeal form and rarely provoke any debate about the changing nature of heterosexuality itself. — Richard Dunphy

In Illinois a pregnant woman who takes an illegal drug can be prosecuted for 'delivering a controlled substance to a minor.' This is an explicit recognition that the unborn is a person with rights of her own. But that same woman who is prosecuted and jailed for endangering her child is perfectly free to abort her child. In America today, it is illegal to harm your preborn child, but it is perfectly legal to kill him. — Randy Alcorn

Justice isn't about fixing the past; it's about healing the past's future. — Jackson Burnett

Forgiveness is spiritual. Punishment is legal," Leo says. "They're not mutually exclusive. — Jodi Picoult