Levi Woodbury Quotes

For centuries we have been living in the society where not laws but people ruled, where there was no legal state.

Law is any application for the official use of coercion that succeeds.

Justice, sir, is the great interest of man on earth. It is the ligament which holds civilized beings and civilized nations together.

A people who are revolted by an execution, but not shocked at an assassination--require that the public authorities should be armed with much sterner powers of repression than elsewhere, since the first indispensable requisites of civilized life have nothing else to rest on.

In all governments, there must of necessity be both the law and the sword; laws without arms would give us not liberty, but licentiousness; and arms without laws, would produce not subjection, but slavery. The law, therefore, should be unto the sword what the handle is to the hatchet; it should direct the stroke and temper the force.

When you break the big laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.

Law is the great civilizing machinery. It liberates the desire to build and subdues the desire to destroy.

Thus lynch law held sway in the far West until civilization spread into the Territories and the orderly processes of law took its place. The emergency no longer existing, lynching gradually disappeared from the West.

Like king, like law; like law, like people.

Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being.

Law is order, and good law is good order.

Liberty unregulated by law becomes anarchy.

A body of law is more rational and more civilized when every rule it contains is referred articulately and definitely to an end which it subserves and when the grounds for desiring that end are stated, or are ready to be stated in words.

Laws and institutions require to be adapted, not to good men, but to bad

Order is said to exist where the people of the country have, as a general rule, ceased to prosecute their quarrels by private force, and acquired the habit of referring the decision of their disputes and the redress of their injuries to the public authorities.

Justice is incidental to law and order

In our country the law of the strong does not prevail. The strength of the law prevails.

Law. Law. That is what saves nations from the most imminent dangers.

The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.

About 10,000 years ago, the winners of wars began incorporating the losers into larger societies. The victors found that the only way to make these larger societies work was by developing stronger governments; and one of the first things these governments had to do, if they wanted to stay in power, was suppress violence among their subjects.

In the supreme struggle of social order against anarchy, we cannot deny to the champions of civilized society the moral latitude which is by common consent accorded to armed men fighting for their country against a foreign foe.

Mob rule can not be allowed to override the decisions of our courts.

Law and order in our communities doesn't arise spontaneously.

The rule of law is crucial to a civilized society - so we should go out of our way to uphold and strengthen it to the extent possible.

I just want everybody to follow the law.