Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

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

- Irving, Washington

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

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

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

It would be better to have no laws at all, than to have too many.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

A good lawyer is a bad neighbor.

Proverb, French

The kind of lawyer you hope the other fellow has.

Chandler, Raymond

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

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

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

This is a court of law young man, not a court of justice.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

10.

Ignorance of the law excuses no man from practicing it.

Mizner, Addison

11.

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

12.

Where the law is uncertain there is no law.

Proverb

13.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

14.

If lawyers are disbarred and clergymen defrocked, doesn't it follow that electricians can be delighted, musicians denoted, cowboys deranged, models deposed, tree surgeons debarked, and dry cleaners depressed.

Ostman, Virginia

15.

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

16.

Are not laws dangerous which inhibit the passions? Compare the centuries of anarchy with those of the strongest legalism in any country you like and you will see that it is only when the laws are silent that the greatest actions appear.

Sade, Marquis De

17.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

18.

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

Proverb

19.

I have enforced the law against killing certain animals and many others, but the greatest progress of righteousness among men comes from the exhortation in favor of non-injury to life and abstention from killing living beings.

Asoka

20.

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

21.

I was never ruined but twice; once when I lost a lawsuit and once when I won one.

Voltaire

22.

Lawyers and painters can soon make what's black, white.

Proverb

23.

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

24.

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

Lieberman, Gerald F.

25.

The first thing we do, lets kill the lawyers. [Henry Iv]

Shakespeare, William

26.

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

Pomerantz, Hart

27.

Bad laws are the worst form of tyranny.

Burke, Edmund

28.

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

29.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

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

31.

Good laws make it easier to do right and harder to do wrong.

Gladstone, William E.

32.

Law cannot persuade when it cannot punish.

Saying

33.

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

Diderot, Denis

34.

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

35.

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

Younger, Evelle

36.

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

37.

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.

38.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

39.

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

Kennedy, Robert F.

40.

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

41.

All that makes existence valuable to any one depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people.

Mill, John Stuart

42.

Fish die when they are out of water, and people die without law and order.

Talmud, The

43.

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

44.

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

Engels, Friedrich

45.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

46.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

47.

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

Frost, Robert

48.

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

Montesquieu, Charles De

49.

A country survives its legislation. That truth should not comfort the conservative nor depress the radical. For it means that public policy can enlarge its scope and increase its audacity, can try big experiments without trembling too much over the result. This nation could enter upon the most radical experiments and could afford to fail in them.

Lippmann, Walter

50.

Law, without force, is impotent.

Pascal, Blaise