Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

Rulers were made to be broken.

- Isenberg, Michael

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

Lawyers and woodpeckers have long bills.

Proverb

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

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

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.

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

Young, Brigham

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

Trapp, June L.

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.

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

10.

Rulers were made to be broken.

Isenberg, Michael

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Pope, Alexander

17.

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

18.

Where the law is uncertain there is no law.

Proverb

19.

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

20.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

21.

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

Goldsmith, Oliver

22.

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

Jones, Sir William

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Younger, Evelle

26.

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

Moore, Thomas

27.

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

Voltaire

28.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

29.

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

Sprecht, Robert D.

30.

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

31.

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

Proverb

32.

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

Froude, James A.

33.

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

Irving, Washington

34.

The good of the people is the greatest law.

Cicero, Marcus T.

35.

The more corrupt the state, the more laws.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

36.

A good lawyer is a bad neighbor.

Proverb, French

37.

Laws are the sovereigns of sovereigns.

Louis XIV

38.

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

Keats, John

39.

In law, nothing is certain but the expense.

Butler, Samuel

40.

Keep out of Chancery. It's being ground to bits in a slow mill; it's being roasted at a slow fire; it's being stung to death by single bees; it's being drowned by drops; it's going mad by grains.

Dickens, Charles

41.

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

Brougham, Lord Henry P.

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.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

44.

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

Hughes, Charles Evans

45.

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

Epitaph

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.

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

48.

The judge is found guilty when a criminal is acquitted.

Syrus, Publilius

49.

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

50.

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