What are laws?

Famous quotes containing the word laws:

“It ain’t no sin if you crack a few laws now and then, just so long as you don’t break any.”
—Mae West, U.S. actor, screenwriter, and A. Edward Sutherland. Peaches O’Day (Mae West)

“At present the globe goes with a shattered constitution in its orbit.... No doubt the simple powers of nature, properly directed by man, would make it healthy and a paradise; as the laws of man’s own constitution but wait to be obeyed, to restore him to health and happiness.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

“Nothing is accidental in the universe—this is one of my Laws of Physics—except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity.”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)