Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

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

- Stanton, Elizabeth Cady

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

Fools and obstinate men make lawyers rich.

Proverb

The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime.

Stirner, Max

Our human laws are more or less imperfect copies of the external laws as we see them.

Froude, James A.

Lawyers are like rhinoceroses: thick skinned, short-sighted, and always ready to charge.

Mellor, David

It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for law, so much as a respect for right.

Thoreau, Henry David

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

Sprecht, Robert D.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

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

Where the law is uncertain there is no law.

Proverb

10.

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

11.

Whenever men take the law into their own hands, the loser is the law. And when the law loses, freedom languishes.

Kennedy, Robert F.

12.

It is unfair to believe everything we hear about lawyers, some of it might not be true.

Lieberman, Gerald F.

13.

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

14.

I would uphold the law if for no other reason but to protect myself.

Moore, Thomas

15.

As soon as you begin to say We have always done things this way -- perhaps that might be a better way, conscious law-making is beginning. As soon as you begin to say We do things this way -- they do things that way -- what is to be done about it? men are beginning to feel towards justice, that resides between the endless jar of right and wrong.

Cam, Helen M.

16.

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

Epitaph

17.

Where the law ends tyranny begins.

Fielding, Henry

18.

When one wanted one's interests looking after whatever the cost, it was not so well for a lawyer to be over honest, else he might not be up to other people's tricks.

Eliot, George

19.

Lawyers -- a profession it is to disguise matters.

More, Thomas

20.

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

Mcilvanney, William

21.

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

Irving, Washington

22.

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

23.

The law was made for one thing alone, for the exploitation of those who don't understand it, or are prevented by naked misery from obeying it.

Brecht, Bertolt

24.

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

Pomerantz, Hart

25.

Lawyers enjoy a little mystery, you know. Why, if everybody came forward and told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth straight out, we should all retire to the workhouse.

Sayers, Dorothy L.

26.

A good lawyer is a bad neighbor.

Proverb, French

27.

Laws and institutions, like clocks, must occasionally be cleaned, wound up, and set to true time.

Beecher, Henry Ward

28.

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

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.

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

Brougham, Lord Henry P.

31.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

People crushed by laws, have no hope but to evade power. If the laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to the law; and those who have must to hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous.

Burke, Edmund

33.

No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my own constitution; the only wrong what is against it.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

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

Welles, Orson

35.

In law, nothing is certain but the expense.

Butler, Samuel

36.

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

37.

We eagerly get hold of a law that serves as a weapon to our passions.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

A successful lawsuit is the one worn by a policeman.

Frost, Robert

42.

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

43.

Laws too gentle, are seldom obeyed; too severe, seldom executed.

Franklin, Benjamin

44.

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

Montesquieu, Charles De

45.

A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.

Puzo, Mario

46.

The more corrupt the state, the more laws.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

47.

An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so.

Gandhi, Mahatma

48.

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

49.

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

Nizer, Louis

50.

It would be better to have no laws at all, than to have too many.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De