Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

Amongst the learned the lawyers claim first place, the most self-satisfied class of people, as they roll their rock of Sisyphus and string together six hundred laws in the same breath, no matter whether relevant or not, piling up opinion on opinion and gloss on gloss to make their profession seem the most difficult of all. Anything which causes trouble has special merit in their eyes.

- Erasmus, Desiderius

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

The law often permits what honor prohibits.

Saurin, Bernard Joseph

We should have learnt by now that laws and court decisions can only point the way. They can establish criteria of right and wrong. And they can provide a basis for rooting out the evils of bigotry and racism. But they cannot wipe away centuries of oppression and injustice -- however much we might desire it.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

Ignorance of the law excuses no man from practicing it.

Mizner, Addison

Keep out of Chancery. It's being ground to bits in a slow mill; it's being roasted at a slow fire; it's being stung to death by single bees; it's being drowned by drops; it's going mad by grains.

Dickens, Charles

Even an attorney of moderate talent can postpone doomsday year after year, for the system of appeals that pervades American jurisprudence amounts to a legalistic wheel of fortune, a game of chance, somewhat fixed in the favor of the criminal, that the participants play interminably.

Capote, Truman

Let reverence for the laws be breathed by every American mother to the lisping babe that prattles on her lap. Let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges. Let it be written in primers, spelling books, and in almanacs. Let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in the courts of justice. And, in short, let it become the political religion of the nation.

Lincoln, Abraham

I was never ruined but twice; once when I lost a lawsuit and once when I won one.

Voltaire

In law, nothing is certain but the expense.

Butler, Samuel

I have enforced the law against killing certain animals and many others, but the greatest progress of righteousness among men comes from the exhortation in favor of non-injury to life and abstention from killing living beings.

Asoka

10.

Under any conditions, anywhere, whatever you are doing, there is some ordinance under which you can be booked.

Sprecht, Robert D.

11.

The laws of each are convertible into the laws of any other.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

A judge is a law student who grades his own papers.

Mencken, H. L.

13.

It is the trade of lawyers to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour.

Jefferson, Thomas

14.

Scarcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved, sooner or later, into a judicial question.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

15.

The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science, that smiles in yer face while it picks yer pocket: and the glorious uncertainty of it is of more use to the professors than the justice of it.

Macklin, Charles

16.

The good lawyer is not the man who has an eye to every side and angle of contingency, and qualifies all his qualifications, but who throws himself on your part so heartily, that he can get you out of a scrape.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.

Engels, Friedrich

18.

The kind of lawyer you hope the other fellow has.

Chandler, Raymond

19.

The law isn't justice. It's a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.

Chandler, Raymond

20.

The only laws of matter are those that our minds must fabricate and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter.

Maxwell, James Clerk

21.

The law is only one of several imperfect and more or less external ways of defending what is better in life against what is worse. By itself, the law can never create anything better. Establishing respect for the law does not automatically ensure a better life for that, after all, is a job for people and not for laws and institutions.

Havel, Vaclav

22.

The due process of law as we use it, I believe, rests squarely on the liberal idea of conflict and resolution.

Trapp, June L.

23.

The judge is found guilty when a criminal is acquitted.

Syrus, Publilius

24.

To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady

25.

The law helps those who watch, not those who sleep.

Proverb

26.

Some things are easier to legalize than to legitimate.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

27.

It is difficult to make our material condition better by the best law, but it is easy enough to ruin it by bad laws.

Roosevelt, Theodore

28.

The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.

Crisp, Quentin

29.

A country survives its legislation. That truth should not comfort the conservative nor depress the radical. For it means that public policy can enlarge its scope and increase its audacity, can try big experiments without trembling too much over the result. This nation could enter upon the most radical experiments and could afford to fail in them.

Lippmann, Walter

30.

Curse on all laws, but those that love has made.

Pope, Alexander

31.

When the severity of the law is to be softened, let pity, not bribes, be the motive.

Cervantes, Miguel De

32.

Somebody figured it out -- we have 35 million laws trying to enforce Ten Commandments.

Wilson, Earl

33.

Lawyers and painters can soon make what's black, white.

Proverb

34.

No civilization would ever have been possible without a framework of stability, to provide the wherein for the flux of change. Foremost among the stabilizing factors, more enduring than customs, manners and traditions, are the legal systems that regulate our life in the world and our daily affairs with each other.

Arendt, Hannah

35.

Who thinks the law has anything to do with justice? It's what we have because we can't have justice.

Mcilvanney, William

36.

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.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

37.

Young lawyers attend the courts, not because they have business there, but because they have no business.

Irving, Washington

38.

Erasmus, Desiderius

39.

A jury too often has at least one member more ready to hang the panel than to hang the traitor.

Lincoln, Abraham

40.

The magistrates are the ministers for the laws, the judges their interpreters, the rest of us are servants of the law, that we all may be free.

Cicero, Marcus T.

41.

I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

42.

I think we may class the lawyer in the natural history of monsters.

Keats, John

43.

The jury consist of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.

Frost, Robert

44.

Here lies one believe it if you can, who thought an attorney, was a honest man.

Epitaph

45.

I said there was a society of men among us, bred up from their youth in the art of proving by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black, and black is white, according as they are paid. To this society all the rest of the people are as slaves.

Swift, Jonathan

46.

The good of the people is the greatest law.

Cicero, Marcus T.

47.

No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be within the law? The law is stationary. The law is fixed. The law is a chariot wheel which binds us all regardless of conditions or place or time.

Goldman, Emma

48.

Lawyers -- a profession it is to disguise matters.

More, Thomas

49.

The only road to the highest stations in this country is that of the law.

Jones, Sir William

50.

Courts of law, and all the paraphernalia and folly of law cannot be found in a rational state of society.

Owen, Robert