Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

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

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

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

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

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

Franklin, Benjamin

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

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.

Avoid lawsuits beyond all things; they pervert your conscience, impair your health, and dissipate your property.

La Bruyere, Jean De

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

Keats, John

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

The more corrupt the state, the more laws.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

10.

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

Lafollette, Suzanne

11.

Some things are easier to legalize than to legitimate.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

12.

The trouble with law is lawyers.

Darrow, Clarence

13.

Somebody figured it out -- we have 35 million laws trying to enforce Ten Commandments.

Wilson, Earl

14.

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

Moore, Thomas

15.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

20.

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

Sprecht, Robert D.

21.

It is the trade of lawyers to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour.

Jefferson, Thomas

22.

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

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

23.

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

24.

Lawyers and woodpeckers have long bills.

Proverb

25.

The clearest way to show what the rule of law means to us in everyday life is to recall what has happened when there is no rule of law.

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

26.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Laws are the sovereigns of sovereigns.

Louis XIV

30.

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

31.

The severity of the laws prevents their execution.

Montesquieu, Charles De

32.

Fools and obstinate men make lawyers rich.

Proverb

33.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

34.

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

35.

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

Proverb

36.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

37.

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

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.

Chandler, Raymond

40.

Petty laws breed great crimes.

Ouida

41.

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

Puzo, Mario

42.

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

Welles, Orson

43.

The good of the people is the greatest law.

Cicero, Marcus T.

44.

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

45.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

46.

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

Brougham, Lord Henry P.

47.

Ignorance of the law excuses no man from practicing it.

Mizner, Addison

48.

Certainly one of the highest duties of the citizen is a scrupulous obedience to the laws of the nation. But it is not the highest duty.