“No one rules if no one obeys”
“You are interfering in my business, warlock. Magnus spat blood into his face. You are torturing a child in my city, Shadowhunter. [...] I thought we were playing a game where we said what the other person was and what we were doing. Magnus told him. Did I get it wrong? Can I guess again? are you breaking your own sacred Laws, asshole?”
“I think that everything should be made available to everybody, and I mean LSD, cocaine, codeine, grass, opium, the works. Nothing on earth available to any man should be confiscated and made unlawful by other men in more seemingly powerful and advantageous positions.”
“But the law is an odd thing. For instance, one country in Europe has a law that requires all its bakers to sell bread at the exact same price. A certain island has a law that forbids anyone from removing its fruit. And a town not too far from where you live has a law that bars me from coming within five miles of its borders.”
“Now, legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways. Thus we have an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, benefits, subsidies, encouragements, progressive taxation, public schools, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, a right to the tools of labor, free credit, and so on, and so on.”
“Most civilisation is based on cowardice. It s so easy to civilize by teaching cowardice. You water down the standards which would lead to bravery. You restrain the will. You regulate the appetites. You fence in the horizons. You make a law for every movement. You deny the existence of chaos. You teach even the children to breathe slowly. You tame.”
“You are in favour of the common people?” said Dragon mildly. The common people?” said Vimes. “They’re nothing special. They’re no different from the rich and powerful except they’ve got no money or power. But the law should be there to balance things up a bit. So I suppose I’ve got to be on their side.”
“Make ethical choices in what we buy, do, and watch. In a consumer-driven society our individual choices, used collectively for the good of animals and nature, can change the world faster than laws.”
“The most dangerous thing in life is an incompetent that has been given a gun and a law enforcement badge.”
“Defending unpopular positions is what lawyers do”
“While we think of the boundary between what is legal and what is not as a clear dividing line, it is far from being so. Rather, the boundary becomes further and further indented and folded over time, yielding a jagged and complicated border, rather than a clear straight line. In the end, the law turns out to look like a fractal: no matter how much you zoom in on such a shape, there is always more unevenness, more detail to observe. Any general rule must end up dealing with exceptions, which in turn split into further exceptions and rules, yielding an increasingly complicated, branching structure.”
“When placing an emergency call, it is important to remember that a corrupt or incompetent cop may be on their way to you.”
“A government of laws, and not of men.”
“Frequent suggestions were made during the course of the trial that the motives of the donor and the donees alike, in carrying out this transaction, were to escape death duties. I feel constrained to dispose once and for all of these suggestions by the short answer that the existence or otherwise of such motives is irrelevant, excep as evidence for or against the bona fides of the transactions. There is the highest authority for the proposition that, if a man can lawfully so order his affairs that the payment of revenue duties of any kind is reduced or avoided altogether, there is no legal objection to his doing so. Whatever may be thought as the the morality of such transactions in these times from the point of view of patriotism and public spirit, there is no ground for ignoring their legal effect, unless such transactions be proved to be amere sham, such as those falling within the words not bona fide in the act of 1894, or the phrase artificial transaction in the Finance Acts of more recent years. Attorney General vs. Goneril Albany in re the estate of King Lear, MORE LEGAL FICTIONS”
“Only the Army conducts an annual assessment, and they appear to do relatively little to analyze the problem, contributions to the problem, and potential solutions.”
“The reason is, because it’s of more importance to community, that innocence should be protected, than it is, that guilt should be punished.”
“THE MAIN DUTY OF LAW enforcement is law breaking. Right now the disciplined forces jobs are the reserve of the ‘elite’ and security has little meaning, money is the arbiter of law breaking.”