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Quotes of the Day for 19 March 2005 - Law

Today's birthday list ran to men whose career involved the law. Wyatt Earp was born at Monmouth, Illinois on this day in 1848. The great advocate William Jennings Bryan was born at Salem, Illinois on this day in 1860. Earl Warren, the US Chief Justice known for investigating the assassination of John Kennedy, came along in 1891 (Los Angeles). And in 1904 John J. Sirica was born (Waterbury, Connecticut), later watched by millions as the various trials of the Watergate conspirators fascinated America. Herewith some thoughts on law and justice.

The business of the law is to make sense of the confusion of what we call human life - to reduce it to order but at the same time to give it possibility, scope, even dignity.
     - Archibald MacLeish, 1892 - 1982

There is no man so good, who, were he to submit all his thoughts and actions to the laws, would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.
     - Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, 1533 - 1592

Laws are like spider's webs which, if anything small falls into them they ensnare it, but large things break through and escape.
     - Anacharsis

Fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalised medium of reason, that's all we have between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feelings.
     - Felix Frankfurter, 1882 - 1965

Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice.
     - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It usually takes a hundred years to make a law, and then, after it has done its work, it usually takes another hundred years to get rid of it.
     - Henry Ward Beecher, 1813 - 1887

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