A Quote by William E. Gladstone

Good laws make it easier to do right and harder to do wrong.

William E. Gladstone

Quote Topics

Easier Good Harder Laws Make Right Wrong

Quote Author

William E. Gladstone
British - Leader
December 29, 1809 - May 19, 1898

Integrity - Take the harder right over the easier wrong.

Kelly Perdew

Leaders always choose the harder right rather than the easier wrong.

Orrin Woodward

We cannot, by total reliance on law, escape the duty to judge right and wrong... There are good laws and there are occasionally bad laws, and it conforms to the highest traditions of a free society to offer resistance to bad laws, and to disobey them.

Alexander Bickel

I dont believe in good human beings, but I believe you can have structures that make it easier to make the right choice or the wrong choice.

Justin Welby

I don't believe in good human beings, but I believe you can have structures that make it easier to make the right choice or the wrong choice.

Justin Welby

A single assembly will never be a steady guardian of the laws, if Machiavel is right, when he says, Men are never good but through necessity: on the contrary, when good and evil are left to their choice, they will not fail to throw every thing into disorder and confusion. Hunger and poverty may make men industrious, but laws only can make them good; for, if men were so of themselves, there would be no occasion for laws; but, as the case is far otherwise, they are absolutely necessary.

John Adams

The idea that laws decide what is right or wrong is mistaken in general. Laws are, at their best, an attempt to achieve justice; to say that laws define justice or ethical conduct is turning things upside down.

Richard Stallman

Is it not possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong? Are laws to be enforced simply because they were made? Or declared by any number of men to be good, if they are NOT good?

Henry David Thoreau

I had a very insightful friend who warned me back when I stopped reading scripts, 'It's easier to change directions while you're still moving.' If you stop, it's harder to get started again. I still don't think I made the wrong decision, but he was right.

Debra Winger

Nonfiction is both easier and harder to write than fiction. It's easier because the facts are already laid out before you, and there is already a narrative arc. What makes it harder is that you are not free to use your imagination and creativity to fill in any missing gaps within the story.

Amy Bloom

You must not deprive the colonies of their right to make laws for themselves. Parliament should only make laws necessary for the empire as a whole.

Thomas Hutchinson

As good government is an empire of laws, how shall your laws be made? In a large society, inhabiting an extensive country, it is impossible that the whole should assemble to make laws. The first necessary step, then, is to depute power from the many to a few of the most wise and good.

John Adams

Liberals are always proposing perfectly insane ideas, laws that will make everybody happy, laws that will make everything right, make us live forever, and all be rich. Conservatives are never that stupid.

P. J. O'Rourke

It gets harder all the time, Bev Shaw once said. Harder, yet easier. One gets used to things getting harder; one ceases to be surprised that what used to be hard as hard can be grows harder yet.

J. M. Coetzee

The main foundations of every state, new states as well as ancient or composite ones, are good laws and good arms you cannot have good laws without good arms, and where there are good arms, good laws inevitably follow.