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

The law condemns and punishes only actions within certain definite and narrow limits; it thereby justifies, in a way, all similar actions that lie outside those limits. – Leo Tolstoy, What I Believe

Many laws as certainly make bad men, as bad men make many laws. – Walter Savage Landor, Imaginary Conversations