Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

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

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

Law cannot persuade when it cannot punish.

Saying

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

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

Diderot, Denis

Some things are easier to legalize than to legitimate.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

Laws are not invented. They grow out of circumstances.

Azarias

A successful lawsuit is the one worn by a policeman.

Frost, Robert

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

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

10.

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

Mencken, H. L.

11.

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

Shakespeare, William

12.

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

13.

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

Froude, James A.

14.

The law is reason, free from passion.

Aristotle

15.

Anybody who thinks talk is cheap should get some legal advice.

Jones, Franklin P.

16.

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

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

17.

The severity of the laws prevents their execution.

Montesquieu, Charles De

18.

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

19.

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

Halifax, Edward F.

20.

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

Jones, Sir William

21.

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

Johnson, Samuel

22.

Laws are felt only when the individual comes into conflict with them.

Lafollette, Suzanne

23.

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

24.

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

Hughes, Charles Evans

25.

It is the trade of lawyers to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour.

Jefferson, Thomas

26.

Where the law is uncertain there is no law.

Proverb

27.

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

Mcilvanney, William

28.

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

Epitaph

29.

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

Talmud, The

30.

Rulers were made to be broken.

Isenberg, Michael

31.

Petty laws breed great crimes.

Ouida

32.

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

Nizer, Louis

33.

A good lawyer is a bad neighbor.

Proverb, French

34.

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

35.

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

36.

Ignorance of the law excuses no man from practicing it.

Mizner, Addison

37.

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

Younger, Evelle

38.

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

Pomerantz, Hart

39.

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

40.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

41.

Lawyers enjoy a little mystery, you know. Why, if everybody came forward and told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth straight out, we should all retire to the workhouse.

Sayers, Dorothy L.

42.

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

43.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

44.

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

Keats, John

45.

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

Kennedy, Robert F.

46.

The only laws of matter are those that our minds must fabricate and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter.