Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

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

- Bismarck, Otto Von

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

Lawyers and woodpeckers have long bills.

Proverb

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

Mencken, H. L.

The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.

Crisp, Quentin

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

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

Stirner, Max

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

Laws are not invented. They grow out of circumstances.

Azarias

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

A good lawyer is a bad neighbor.

Proverb, French

10.

All that makes existence valuable to any one depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people.

Mill, John Stuart

11.

Petty laws breed great crimes.

Ouida

12.

Where the law ends tyranny begins.

Fielding, Henry

13.

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

14.

Laws are not masters, but servants, and he rules them, who obeys them.

Becker, Ward

15.

The more corrupt the state, the more laws.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

16.

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

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady

17.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

18.

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

Proverb

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.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Younger, Evelle

23.

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

24.

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

Goldsmith, Oliver

25.

Our demands are simple, normal, and therefore they are difficult to satisfy. All we ask is that an actor on the stage live in accordance with natural laws

Stanislavisky, Konstantin

26.

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

27.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

28.

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

29.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

30.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

31.

Some things are easier to legalize than to legitimate.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

32.

The law is reason, free from passion.

Aristotle

33.

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

Jones, Sir William

34.

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

Moore, Thomas

35.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

36.

It is impossible for us to break the law. We can only break ourselves against the law.

Mille, Cecil B. De

37.

Fish die when they are out of water, and people die without law and order.

Talmud, The

38.

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.

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Nizer, Louis

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

46.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

47.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

48.

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