Law

"It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder."
        --Frederic Bastiat

"Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny."
        --Edmund Burke

"I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution."
        --Ulysses S. Grant

"[The] substance of the law at any given time pretty nearly corresponds, so far as it goes, with what is then understood to be convenient."
        --Oliver Wendell Holmes

"The worst evil of disregard for some law is that it destroys respect for all law."
        --Herbert Hoover, Inaugural Address, 1929

"Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well-wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others. As the patriots of seventy-six did to the support of the Declaration of Independence, so to the support of the Constitution and Laws, let every American pledge his life, his property, and his sacred honor; let every man remember that to violate the law, is to trample on the blood of his father, and to tear the character of his own, and his childrenīs liberty. Let reverence for the laws, be breathed by every American mother, to the lisping babe, that prattles on her lap--let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; let it be written in Primers, spelling books, and in Almanacs;--let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice. And, in short, let it become the political religion of the nation; and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars."
        --Abraham Lincoln

"Wherever Law ends, Tyranny begins."
        --John Locke

"It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows that the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?"
        --James Madison, Federalist  62

"No man is above the law and no man is below it; nor do we ask any man's permission when we require him to obey it."
        --Theodore Roosevelt