Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

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

- Grant, Ulysses S.

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

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

Younger, Evelle

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

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

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

Mencken, H. L.

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

Diderot, Denis

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

Franklin, Benjamin

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

Rulers were made to be broken.

Isenberg, Michael

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

Epitaph

10.

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

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady

11.

I want to live perfectly above the law, and make it my servant instead of my master.

Young, Brigham

12.

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

13.

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.

14.

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

Mcilvanney, William

15.

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

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

16.

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

Wilson, Earl

17.

Some things are easier to legalize than to legitimate.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

18.

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

Pope, Alexander

19.

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

Halifax, Edward F.

20.

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

Jones, Sir William

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

A successful lawsuit is the one worn by a policeman.

Frost, Robert

26.

The severity of the laws prevents their execution.

Montesquieu, Charles De

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 law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.

Crisp, Quentin

29.

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

30.

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.

31.

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

Irving, Washington

32.

The kind of lawyer you hope the other fellow has.

Chandler, Raymond

33.

The law is reason, free from passion.

Aristotle

34.

In law, nothing is certain but the expense.

Butler, Samuel

35.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

36.

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

Lieberman, Gerald F.

37.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

38.

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

39.

Law and equity are two things which God has joined, but which man has put asunder.

Colton, Charles Caleb

40.

Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.

Montesquieu, Charles De

41.

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.

42.

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

Brougham, Lord Henry P.

43.

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

Sprecht, Robert D.

44.

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

Proverb

45.

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

46.

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

47.

Fools and obstinate men make lawyers rich.

Proverb

48.

The magistrates are the ministers for the laws, the judges their interpreters, the rest of us are servants of the law, that we all may be free.

Cicero, Marcus T.

49.

Where the law is uncertain there is no law.

Proverb

50.

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