Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

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

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

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.

The severity of the laws prevents their execution.

Montesquieu, Charles De

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

Where the law ends tyranny begins.

Fielding, Henry

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

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

Kennedy, Robert F.

10.

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

11.

The more corrupt the state, the more laws.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

12.

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

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

13.

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

14.

The kind of lawyer you hope the other fellow has.

Chandler, Raymond

15.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Diderot, Denis

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Talmud, The

22.

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

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady

23.

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

Proverb

24.

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

25.

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

Epitaph

26.

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

Puzo, Mario

27.

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

28.

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

Bismarck, Otto Von

29.

The good of the people is the greatest law.

Cicero, Marcus T.

30.

The law often permits what honor prohibits.

Saurin, Bernard Joseph

31.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

32.

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

Goldsmith, Oliver

33.

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

Lieberman, Gerald F.

34.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

35.

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

Engels, Friedrich

36.

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.

37.

The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime.

Stirner, Max

38.

Lawyers and woodpeckers have long bills.

Proverb

39.

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

40.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

41.

Laws are the sovereigns of sovereigns.

Louis XIV

42.

The law is reason, free from passion.

Aristotle

43.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

44.

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

45.

People crushed by laws, have no hope but to evade power. If the laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to the law; and those who have must to hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous.

Burke, Edmund

46.

Martineau, Harriet

47.

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

Montesquieu, Charles De

48.

Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.

Montesquieu, Charles De

49.

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

50.

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

Trapp, June L.