A Quote by Benjamin Franklin

Laws without morals are in vain.

Benjamin Franklin

Quote Topics

Laws Morals Vain Without

Quote Author

Benjamin Franklin
American - Politician
January 17, 1706 - April 17, 1790

A nation,” he heard himself say, “consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual’s morals are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation’s laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn’t a nation.

William Gibson

The best laws cannot make a constitution work in spite of morals; morals can turn the worst laws to advantage.

Alexis de Tocqueville

The best laws cannot make a constitution work in spite of morals; morals can turn the worst laws to advantage. That is a commonplace truth, but one to which my studies are always bringing me back. It is the central point in my conception. I see it at the end of all my reflections.

Alexis de Tocqueville

What can laws do without morals?

Benjamin Franklin

Because just as good morals, if they are to be maintained, have need of the laws, so the laws, if they are to be observed, have need of good morals.

Niccolo Machiavelli

In vain, without the Bible, we increase penal laws and draw entrenchments around our institutions.

James McHenry

Morals consist of political morals, commercial morals, ecclesiastical morals, and morals.

Mark Twain

The laws of morals and the laws of music are the same

Zoltan Kodaly

The laws of morals and the laws of music are the same.

Zoltan Kodaly

In such a performance you may lay the foundation of national happiness only in religion, not by leaving it doubtful "whether morals can exist without it," but by asserting that without religion morals are the effects of causes as purely physical as pleasant breezes and fruitful seasons.

Benjamin Rush

If you have to make laws to hurt a group of people just to prove your morals and faith, then you have no true morals or faith to prove.

George Takei

Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the toughfibre of the human heart. The laws of friendship are austere and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Some of the domestic evils of drunkenness are houses without windows, gardens without fences, fields without tillage, barns without roofs, children without clothing, principles, morals or manners.

Benjamin Franklin

It is not only vain, but wicked, in a legislator to frame laws in opposition to the laws of nature, and to arm them with the terrors of death. This is truly creating crimes in order to punish them.

Thomas Jefferson

I could show how largely our laws and customs are based upon the laws of Moses and the teachings of Christ; how constantly the Bible is appealed to as the guide of life and the authority in questions of morals... Add a volume of unofficial declaration to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation.