Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

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

- Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

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

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

Nizer, Louis

Laws are the sovereigns of sovereigns.

Louis XIV

The law is reason, free from passion.

Aristotle

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

Goldsmith, Oliver

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

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.

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

Stirner, Max

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

10.

Where the law ends tyranny begins.

Fielding, Henry

11.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

12.

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

13.

We should have learnt by now that laws and court decisions can only point the way. They can establish criteria of right and wrong. And they can provide a basis for rooting out the evils of bigotry and racism. But they cannot wipe away centuries of oppression and injustice -- however much we might desire it.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Lawyers -- a profession it is to disguise matters.

More, Thomas

17.

Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.

Montesquieu, Charles De

18.

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

19.

Where the law is uncertain there is no law.

Proverb

20.

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

21.

Law cannot persuade when it cannot punish.

Saying

22.

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

Wilson, Earl

23.

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

24.

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

Lieberman, Gerald F.

25.

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.

Jefferson, Thomas

26.

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

Trapp, June L.

27.

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

28.

Fools and obstinate men make lawyers rich.

Proverb

29.

The kind of lawyer you hope the other fellow has.

Chandler, Raymond

30.

Rulers were made to be broken.

Isenberg, Michael

31.

Here lies one believe it if you can, who thought an attorney, was a honest man.

Epitaph

32.

A good lawyer is a bad neighbor.

Proverb, French

33.

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

34.

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

Pope, Alexander

35.

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

Halifax, Edward F.

36.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

37.

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

38.

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

Brougham, Lord Henry P.

39.

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

40.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

41.

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

42.

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

Froude, James A.

43.

Ignorance of the law excuses no man from practicing it.

Mizner, Addison

44.

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

45.

The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.

Crisp, Quentin

46.

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

47.

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

Pomerantz, Hart

48.

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

Puzo, Mario

49.

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

Jones, Sir William

50.

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