Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

Lawyers know life practically. A bookish man should always have them to converse with.

- Johnson, Samuel

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

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

Mencken, H. L.

The law isn't justice. It's a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.

Chandler, Raymond

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

Mcilvanney, William

It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for law, so much as a respect for right.

Thoreau, Henry David

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

Trapp, June L.

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

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

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

Some things are easier to legalize than to legitimate.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

10.

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

Proverb, Spanish

11.

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

Froude, James A.

12.

Laws are not masters, but servants, and he rules them, who obeys them.

Becker, Ward

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

16.

The severity of the laws prevents their execution.

Montesquieu, Charles De

17.

The law was made for one thing alone, for the exploitation of those who don't understand it, or are prevented by naked misery from obeying it.

Brecht, Bertolt

18.

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

Kennedy, Robert F.

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Laws are not invented. They grow out of circumstances.

Azarias

23.

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

Proverb

24.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

25.

A good lawyer is a bad neighbor.

Proverb, French

26.

The more corrupt the state, the more laws.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

27.

Scarcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved, sooner or later, into a judicial question.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

28.

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

Younger, Evelle

29.

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

Gladstone, William E.

30.

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

Mill, John Stuart

31.

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

Voltaire

32.

Where the law ends tyranny begins.

Fielding, Henry

33.

Petty laws breed great crimes.

Ouida

34.

Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.

Montesquieu, Charles De

35.

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.

36.

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

37.

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

Engels, Friedrich

38.

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

39.

Ignorance of the law excuses no man from practicing it.

Mizner, Addison

40.

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

Irving, Washington

41.

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

42.

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

Nizer, Louis

43.

Lawyers and woodpeckers have long bills.

Proverb

44.

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

45.

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

Talmud, The

46.

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

47.

The law is reason, free from passion.

Aristotle

48.

Law cannot persuade when it cannot punish.

Saying

49.

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

50.

Rulers were made to be broken.

Isenberg, Michael