Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

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

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

Law cannot persuade when it cannot punish.

Saying

The due process of law as we use it, I believe, rests squarely on the liberal idea of conflict and resolution.

Trapp, June L.

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

If the laws could speak for themselves, they would complain of the lawyers.

Halifax, Edward F.

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

Mille, Cecil B. De

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

Franklin, Benjamin

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

Jefferson, Thomas

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.

10.

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

Jones, Sir William

11.

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

Montesquieu, Charles De

12.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

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

Pomerantz, Hart

14.

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

Goldsmith, Oliver

15.

Rulers were made to be broken.

Isenberg, Michael

16.

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

17.

The trouble with law is lawyers.

Darrow, Clarence

18.

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

19.

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

Mencken, H. L.

20.

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

Nizer, Louis

21.

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

22.

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

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.

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

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Talmud, The

28.

The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.

Crisp, Quentin

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.

Bad laws are the worst form of tyranny.

Burke, Edmund

31.

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

Froude, James A.

32.

There is no nation so powerful, as the one that obeys its laws not from principles of fear or reason, but from passion.

Montesquieu, Charles De

33.

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

34.

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

Proverb, Spanish

35.

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

Sprecht, Robert D.

36.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

37.

The law is reason, free from passion.

Aristotle

38.

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

Lieberman, Gerald F.

39.

Laws are not invented. They grow out of circumstances.

Azarias

40.

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

Welles, Orson

41.

In a democracy -- even if it is a so-called democracy like our white-?litist one -- the greatest veneration one can show the rule of law is to keep a watch on it, and to reserve the right to judge unjust laws and the subversion of the function of the law by the power of the state. That vigilance is the most important proof of respect for the law.

Gordimer, Nadine

42.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

43.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

44.

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

45.

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

Keats, John

46.

Lawyers and woodpeckers have long bills.

Proverb

47.

The severity of the laws prevents their execution.

Montesquieu, Charles De

48.

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

Puzo, Mario

49.

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

Proverb

50.

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