Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

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

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

The trouble with law is lawyers.

Darrow, Clarence

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

Johnson, Samuel

Law, without force, is impotent.

Pascal, Blaise

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

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

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

The court is like a palace of marble; it's composed of people very hard and very polished.

La Bruyere, Jean De

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

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

The judge is found guilty when a criminal is acquitted.

Syrus, Publilius

10.

Laws are felt only when the individual comes into conflict with them.

Lafollette, Suzanne

11.

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.

12.

Bad laws are the worst form of tyranny.

Burke, Edmund

13.

The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.

Goldsmith, Oliver

14.

Law cannot persuade when it cannot punish.

Saying

15.

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

16.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

17.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

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

19.

Ignorance of the law excuses no man from practicing it.

Mizner, Addison

20.

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

Proverb

21.

Where the law is uncertain there is no law.

Proverb

22.

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

Gladstone, William E.

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Voltaire

26.

The more corrupt the state, the more laws.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

27.

Laws are the sovereigns of sovereigns.

Louis XIV

28.

We enact many laws that manufacture criminals, and then a few that punish them

Tucker, Benjamin Ricketson

29.

Laws are like sausages. It is better not to see them being made.

Bismarck, Otto Von

30.

We may not all break the Ten Commandments, but we are certainly all capable of it. Within us lurks the breaker of all laws, ready to spring out at the first real opportunity.

Duncan, Isadora

31.

If lawyers are disbarred and clergymen defrocked, doesn't it follow that electricians can be delighted, musicians denoted, cowboys deranged, models deposed, tree surgeons debarked, and dry cleaners depressed.

Ostman, Virginia

32.

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

33.

Petty laws breed great crimes.

Ouida

34.

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

35.

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

Sprecht, Robert D.

36.

The decisions of law courts should never be printed: in the long run, they form a counter authority to the law.

Diderot, Denis

37.

Arendt, Hannah

38.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

39.

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.

40.

Fools and obstinate men make lawyers rich.

Proverb

41.

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

42.

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

43.

He who goes to law for a sheep loses his cow.

Proverb, Spanish

44.

A good lawyer is a bad neighbor.

Proverb, French

45.

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

Keats, John

46.

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