Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

In cross examination, as in fishing, nothing is more ungainly than a fisherman pulled into the water by his catch.

- Nizer, Louis

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.

King Jr. Martin Luther

The law is reason, free from passion.

Aristotle

Petty laws breed great crimes.

Ouida

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

Lincoln, Abraham

Law cannot persuade when it cannot punish.

Saying

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

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

Sprecht, Robert D.

Lawyers know life practically. A bookish man should always have them to converse with.

Johnson, Samuel

A lawyer is a gentlemen that rescues your estate from your enemies and then keeps it to himself.

Brougham, Lord Henry P.

10.

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

Mcilvanney, William

11.

Law and equity are two things which God has joined, but which man has put asunder.

Colton, Charles Caleb

12.

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

Trapp, June L.

13.

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

14.

A good lawyer is a bad neighbor.

Proverb, French

15.

Rulers were made to be broken.

Isenberg, Michael

16.

Where the law ends tyranny begins.

Fielding, Henry

17.

God works wonders now and then; Behold a lawyer, an honest man.

Franklin, Benjamin

18.

Laws are the sovereigns of sovereigns.

Louis XIV

19.

Law school taught me one thing; how to take two situations that are exactly the same and show how they are different.

Pomerantz, Hart

20.

Are not laws dangerous which inhibit the passions? Compare the centuries of anarchy with those of the strongest legalism in any country you like and you will see that it is only when the laws are silent that the greatest actions appear.

Sade, Marquis De

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

Some things are easier to legalize than to legitimate.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

26.

Fools and obstinate men make lawyers rich.

Proverb

27.

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

28.

The business of the law is to make sense of the confusion of what we call human life -- to reduce it to order but at the same time to give it possibility, scope, even dignity.

Macleish, Archibald

29.

Written laws are like spider's webs; they will catch, it is true, the weak and the poor, but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.

Anacharsis

30.

The good of the people is the greatest law.

Cicero, Marcus T.

31.

Laws and customs may be creative of vice; and should be therefore perpetually under process of observation and correction: but laws and customs cannot be creative of virtue: they may encourage and help to preserve it; but they cannot originate it.

Martineau, Harriet

32.

In a state where corruption abounds, laws must be very numerous.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

33.

Those laws, being forged for universal application, are in perpetual conflict with personal interest, just as personal interest is always in contradiction with the general interest. Good for society, our laws are very bad for the individuals whereof it is composed; for, if they one time protect the individual, they hinder, trouble, fetter him for three quarters of his life.

Sade, Marquis De

34.

An incompetent attorney can delay a trial for years or months. A competent attorney can delay one even longer.

Younger, Evelle

35.

A successful lawsuit is the one worn by a policeman.

Frost, Robert

36.

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

37.

There is no nation so powerful, as the one that obeys its laws not from principles of fear or reason, but from passion.

Montesquieu, Charles De

38.

The laws and the stage, both are a form of exhibitionism.

Welles, Orson

39.

The trouble with law is lawyers.

Darrow, Clarence

40.

Judges ought to be more learned than witty, more reverent than plausible, and more advised than confident. Above all things, integrity is their portion and proper virtue.

Bacon, Francis

41.

The spirit of moderation should also be the spirit of the lawgiver.

Montesquieu, Charles De

42.

Anybody who thinks talk is cheap should get some legal advice.

Jones, Franklin P.

43.

This is a court of law young man, not a court of justice.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

44.

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

45.

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

Frost, Robert

46.

I would be loath to speak ill of any person who I do not know deserves it, but I am afraid he is an attorney.

Johnson, Samuel

47.

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

48.

Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.

King Jr. Martin Luther

49.

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

Gladstone, William E.

50.

I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis on the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.

Coolidge, Calvin