Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

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

- Brougham, Lord Henry P.

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

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

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

In law, nothing is certain but the expense.

Butler, Samuel

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

Stirner, Max

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

Mill, John Stuart

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

Brougham, Lord Henry P.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

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

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

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

Younger, Evelle

10.

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

Sprecht, Robert D.

11.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

12.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

13.

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

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady

14.

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

Proverb

15.

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

Mencken, H. L.

16.

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

17.

Whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest individual without having to pay the penalty for it.

Thoreau, Henry David

18.

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

19.

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.

20.

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

Pomerantz, Hart

21.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

The United States is the greatest law factory the world has ever known.

Hughes, Charles Evans

26.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

27.

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

Pope, Alexander

28.

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

Tucker, Benjamin Ricketson

29.

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

Becker, Ward

30.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

31.

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

Froude, James A.

32.

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

33.

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

Lafollette, Suzanne

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Irving, Washington

37.

A good lawyer is a bad neighbor.

Proverb, French

38.

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.

39.

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

Talmud, The

40.

A lawyers dream of heaven; every man reclaimed his property at the resurrection, and each tried to recover it from all his forefathers.

Butler, Samuel

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Welles, Orson

45.

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

46.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

47.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

48.

Where the law is uncertain there is no law.

Proverb

49.

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