Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

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

- Froude, James A.

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

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

Thoreau, Henry David

Lawyers -- a profession it is to disguise matters.

More, Thomas

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

Bismarck, Otto Von

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

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

Law, without force, is impotent.

Pascal, Blaise

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

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

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

Lincoln, Abraham

10.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

11.

Law cannot persuade when it cannot punish.

Saying

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

15.

A successful lawsuit is the one worn by a policeman.

Frost, Robert

16.

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

Stirner, Max

17.

In law, nothing is certain but the expense.

Butler, Samuel

18.

Whenever men take the law into their own hands, the loser is the law. And when the law loses, freedom languishes.

Kennedy, Robert F.

19.

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

Nizer, Louis

20.

The more corrupt the state, the more laws.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

21.

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

Hughes, Charles Evans

22.

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

Coolidge, Calvin

23.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

24.

Petty laws breed great crimes.

Ouida

25.

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

Pomerantz, Hart

26.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

27.

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

28.

Where the law ends tyranny begins.

Fielding, Henry

29.

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

Mencken, H. L.

30.

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

31.

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

32.

The law is reason, free from passion.

Aristotle

33.

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

Brougham, Lord Henry P.

34.

Rulers were made to be broken.

Isenberg, Michael

35.

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

Tucker, Benjamin Ricketson

36.

I know of no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their strict execution.

Grant, Ulysses S.

37.

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

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady

38.

Lawyers and woodpeckers have long bills.

Proverb

39.

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

Wilson, Earl

40.

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

41.

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

Jones, Sir William

42.

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.

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.

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

Mille, Cecil B. De

45.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

46.

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

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

47.

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

48.

Courts of law, and all the paraphernalia and folly of law cannot be found in a rational state of society.

Owen, Robert

49.

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

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