Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

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

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

The law is reason, free from passion.

Aristotle

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

Lincoln, Abraham

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

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

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

Brougham, Lord Henry P.

Havel, Vaclav

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.

The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.

Crisp, Quentin

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

10.

The severity of the laws prevents their execution.

Montesquieu, Charles De

11.

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

12.

The good of the people is the greatest law.

Cicero, Marcus T.

13.

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

14.

A successful lawsuit is the one worn by a policeman.

Frost, Robert

15.

The court is like a palace of marble; it's composed of people very hard and very polished.

La Bruyere, Jean De

16.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

17.

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

18.

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

Wilson, Earl

19.

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

Pomerantz, Hart

20.

Our demands are simple, normal, and therefore they are difficult to satisfy. All we ask is that an actor on the stage live in accordance with natural laws

Stanislavisky, Konstantin

21.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

22.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

23.

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

24.

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

Frost, Robert

25.

Where the law is uncertain there is no law.

Proverb

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.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

29.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

30.

The law often permits what honor prohibits.

Saurin, Bernard Joseph

31.

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

Hughes, Charles Evans

32.

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

Proverb

33.

A good lawyer is a bad neighbor.

Proverb, French

34.

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

Bismarck, Otto Von

35.

The trouble with law is lawyers.

Darrow, Clarence

36.

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

Trapp, June L.

37.

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

Tucker, Benjamin Ricketson

38.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

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

40.

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

Nizer, Louis

41.

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

42.

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

Diderot, Denis

43.

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

Mencken, H. L.

44.

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

Young, Brigham

45.

Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.

Engels, Friedrich

46.

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

47.

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

Keats, John

48.

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

49.

In law, nothing is certain but the expense.

Butler, Samuel

50.

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

Younger, Evelle