Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

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

- Montesquieu, Charles De

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

Somebody figured it out -- we have 35 million laws trying to enforce Ten Commandments.

Wilson, Earl

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.

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

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

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.

We enact many laws that manufacture criminals, and then a few that punish them

Tucker, Benjamin Ricketson

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

Law, without force, is impotent.

Pascal, Blaise

The magistrates are the ministers for the laws, the judges their interpreters, the rest of us are servants of the law, that we all may be free.

Cicero, Marcus T.

10.

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

11.

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

Shakespeare, William

12.

The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.

Crisp, Quentin

13.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

14.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

15.

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

Hughes, Charles Evans

16.

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

Froude, James A.

17.

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

Kennedy, Robert F.

18.

Some things are easier to legalize than to legitimate.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

19.

A good lawyer is a bad neighbor.

Proverb, French

20.

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

21.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

22.

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

23.

Lawyers -- a profession it is to disguise matters.

More, Thomas

24.

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

Trapp, June L.

25.

The law is reason, free from passion.

Aristotle

26.

All breathing, existing, living, sentient creatures should not be slain nor treated with violence, nor abused, nor tormented, nor driven away. This is the pure unchangeable law.

Sutrakritanga

27.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

28.

The severity of the laws prevents their execution.

Montesquieu, Charles De

29.

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

Pomerantz, Hart

30.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

31.

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

32.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

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

34.

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.

35.

Bad laws are the worst form of tyranny.

Burke, Edmund

36.

Rulers were made to be broken.

Isenberg, Michael

37.

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

Lafollette, Suzanne

38.

When the severity of the law is to be softened, let pity, not bribes, be the motive.

Cervantes, Miguel De

39.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

40.

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

41.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

42.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady

46.

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

47.

Petty laws breed great crimes.

Ouida

48.

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

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.

I would uphold the law if for no other reason but to protect myself.

Moore, Thomas