Extract from "A Man For all Seasons"
by Robert Bolt

Rope: "While you talk, he's gone!"
Thomas Moore: "And go he should, if he was the Devil himself, until he broke the law!"
Rope: "So now you'd give the Devil benefit of the law!"
Thomas Moore: "Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?"
Rope: "I'd cut down every law in England to do that!"
Thomas Moore: "Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you - where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? The country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast - Man's laws, not God's - and if you cut them down - and you're just the man to do it - d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?..."

 

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"Where there is hunger, law is not regarded; and where the law is not regarded, there will be hunger."

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) Poor Richard's Almanac, 1755.

 

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"To me the law seems like a sort of maze through which a client must be led to safety, a collection of reefs, rocks and underwater hazards through which he or she must be piloted."

John Mortimer, Clinging to the Wreckage, 1982.