Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

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

- Mencken, H. L.

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.

Crisp, Quentin

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

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

Proverb

The more corrupt the state, the more laws.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

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

Mill, John Stuart

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

Lafollette, Suzanne

Some things are easier to legalize than to legitimate.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

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

Mellor, David

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

13.

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

Kennedy, Robert F.

14.

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

15.

Ignorance of the law excuses no man from practicing it.

Mizner, Addison

16.

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.

17.

Bad laws are the worst form of tyranny.

Burke, Edmund

18.

The law often permits what honor prohibits.

Saurin, Bernard Joseph

19.

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

Halifax, Edward F.

20.

Courts of law, and all the paraphernalia and folly of law cannot be found in a rational state of society.

Owen, Robert

21.

We eagerly get hold of a law that serves as a weapon to our passions.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

22.

Fools and obstinate men make lawyers rich.

Proverb

23.

Law, without force, is impotent.

Pascal, Blaise

24.

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.

25.

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

Proverb, Spanish

26.

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

27.

Lawyers and woodpeckers have long bills.

Proverb

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Pope, Alexander

32.

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

33.

A good lawyer is a bad neighbor.

Proverb, French

34.

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

Hughes, Charles Evans

35.

Laws are not invented. They grow out of circumstances.

Azarias

36.

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

Mcilvanney, William

37.

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

38.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

39.

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

Sprecht, Robert D.

40.

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

41.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

42.

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

Jones, Sir William

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Epitaph

47.

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

Bismarck, Otto Von

48.

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

49.

Written laws are like spider's webs; they will catch, it is true, the weak and the poor, but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.

Anacharsis

50.

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

Diderot, Denis