Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

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

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

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

Diderot, Denis

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

Montesquieu, Charles De

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

Goldsmith, Oliver

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

Stirner, Max

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

The judge is found guilty when a criminal is acquitted.

Syrus, Publilius

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

Proverb, Spanish

10.

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

Younger, Evelle

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Laws are not invented. They grow out of circumstances.

Azarias

14.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

15.

The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.

Crisp, Quentin

16.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

17.

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

Voltaire

18.

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

Keats, John

19.

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

Mellor, David

20.

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.

21.

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

22.

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

23.

The jury consist of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.

Frost, Robert

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Proverb

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

The kind of lawyer you hope the other fellow has.

Chandler, Raymond

31.

Where the law ends tyranny begins.

Fielding, Henry

32.

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

Becker, Ward

33.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

34.

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.

35.

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

Proverb

36.

Laws are the sovereigns of sovereigns.

Louis XIV

37.

Lawyers -- a profession it is to disguise matters.

More, Thomas

38.

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

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

39.

Where the law is uncertain there is no law.

Proverb

40.

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

41.

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

Irving, Washington

42.

The law often permits what honor prohibits.

Saurin, Bernard Joseph

43.

I would be loath to speak ill of any person who I do not know deserves it, but I am afraid he is an attorney.

Johnson, Samuel

44.

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