"Suppose a nation in some distant region should take the Bible for their only law book, and every member should regulate his conduct by the precepts there contained! Every member would be obliged in conscience to temperance, frugality and industry; to justice, kindness and charity towards his fellow men; and to piety, love and reverence toward Almighty God."

John Adams


"If you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect for the law."

Winston Churchill


"Men do not make laws. They do but discover them. Laws must be justified by something more than the will of the majority. They must rest on the eternal foundation of righteousness. You can display no greater wisdom than by resisting proposals for needless legislation. It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones."

Calvin Coolidge, Have Faith in Massachusetts p.4


"It is the besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which the masses of men exhibit their tyranny."

James Fenimore Cooper, "The American Democrat" (1838)


"We have never stopped sin by passing laws; and in the same way, we are not going to take 
a great moral ideal
and achieve it merely by law."

Dwight D. Eisenhower

"Laws provide against injury from others, but not from ourselves."

Thomas Jefferson


"Law can only kill till gospel comes to transcend it; the king's head on the coins is a death's head unless the economic life is ruled by the spirit."

C.S. Lewis

"The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest form from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a natural philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society."

H.L. Mencken
"No one ever heard of the truth being enforced by law. When the secular is called in to 
sustain an idea, whether new or old, it is always a bad idea, and not infrequently it is
downright idiotic."

H.L. Mencken

"Now, our increasingly humanistic laws, courts, and legislators are giving us a new morality. They tell us, as they strike down laws resting upon Biblical foundations, that morality cannot be legislated, but what they offer is not only legislated morality but salvation by law, and no Christian can accept this. Wherever we look now, whether with respect to poverty, education, civil rights, human rights, peace, and all things else, we see laws passed designed to save man. Supposedly, these laws are going to give us a society free of prejudice, ignorance, disease, poverty, crime, war, and all other things considered to be evil. These legislative programs add up to one thing: salvation by law."

R. J. Rushdoony


"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."
 
Tacitus


"Law, natural or revealed, made for men or for nations, flows from the same Divine source: it is the law of God.... Human law must rest its authority ultimately upon the authority of that law which is Divine.... Far from being rivals or enemies, religion and law are twin sisters, friends, and mutual assistants. Indeed, these two sciences run into each other."

James Wilson


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