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

Goldsmith, Oliver

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

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

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

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

Montesquieu, Charles De

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

Welles, Orson

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

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

10.

The judge is found guilty when a criminal is acquitted.

Syrus, Publilius

11.

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

Pope, Alexander

12.

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

13.

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

Irving, Washington

14.

Bad laws are the worst form of tyranny.

Burke, Edmund

15.

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

16.

In law, nothing is certain but the expense.

Butler, Samuel

17.

A good lawyer is a bad neighbor.

Proverb, French

18.

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

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady

19.

I would uphold the law if for no other reason but to protect myself.

Moore, Thomas

20.

Where the law is uncertain there is no law.

Proverb

21.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

22.

When the severity of the law is to be softened, let pity, not bribes, be the motive.

Cervantes, Miguel De

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.

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

Proverb, Spanish

25.

Law, without force, is impotent.

Pascal, Blaise

26.

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

27.

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

28.

The more corrupt the state, the more laws.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

29.

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

30.

Some things are easier to legalize than to legitimate.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

31.

The good of the people is the greatest law.

Cicero, Marcus T.

32.

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.

33.

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

34.

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.

35.

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

36.

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

Wilson, Earl

37.

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

Mcilvanney, William

38.

Where the law ends tyranny begins.

Fielding, Henry

39.

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

Froude, James A.

40.

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

Halifax, Edward F.

41.

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

42.

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

Pomerantz, Hart

43.

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

Sprecht, Robert D.

44.

All breathing, existing, living, sentient creatures should not be slain nor treated with violence, nor abused, nor tormented, nor driven away. This is the pure unchangeable law.

Sutrakritanga

45.

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

Jones, Sir William

46.

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

Stirner, Max

47.

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

Mencken, H. L.

48.

The trouble with law is lawyers.