Men are too unstable to be just; they are crabbed because they have not passed water at the usual time, or testy because they have not been stroked or praised. – Edward Dahlberg, The Sorrows of Priapus, 1957

The law is an adroit mixture of customs that are beneficial to society, and could be followed even if no law existed, and others that are of advantage to a ruling minority, but harmful to the masses of men, and can be enforced on them only by terror. – Peter Kropotkin, Words of a Rebel

I am further of opinion that it would be better for us to have [no laws] at all than to have them in so prodigious numbers as we have. – Michel de Montaigne, translated