Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

Rulers were made to be broken.

- Isenberg, Michael

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

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

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady

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

Irving, Washington

Lawyers are like rhinoceroses: thick skinned, short-sighted, and always ready to charge.

Mellor, David

The law is reason, free from passion.

Aristotle

The best laws cannot make a constitution work in spite of morals; morals can turn the worst laws to advantage. That is a commonplace truth, but one to which my studies are always bringing me back. It is the central point in my conception. I see it at the end of all my reflections.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.

Puzo, Mario

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

The kind of lawyer you hope the other fellow has.

Chandler, Raymond

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

10.

The severity of the laws prevents their execution.

Montesquieu, Charles De

11.

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

Montesquieu, Charles De

12.

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

Younger, Evelle

13.

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

14.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

15.

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

16.

A successful lawsuit is the one worn by a policeman.

Frost, Robert

17.

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

18.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

19.

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

Gladstone, William E.

20.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

21.

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

Proverb

22.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

23.

The trouble with law is lawyers.

Darrow, Clarence

24.

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

25.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Kennedy, Robert F.

30.

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

Bismarck, Otto Von

31.

The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.

Crisp, Quentin

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Froude, James A.

35.

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

Talmud, The

36.

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

Mencken, H. L.

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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.

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

Ignorance of the law excuses no man from practicing it.

Mizner, Addison

45.

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

Lieberman, Gerald F.

46.

Certainly one of the highest duties of the citizen is a scrupulous obedience to the laws of the nation. But it is not the highest duty.

Jefferson, Thomas

47.

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

48.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

49.

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

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

50.

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