Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

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

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

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.

Law cannot persuade when it cannot punish.

Saying

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

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

Younger, Evelle

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

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

Bismarck, Otto Von

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

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

Shakespeare, William

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

10.

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

11.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

12.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

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.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

15.

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

Goldsmith, Oliver

16.

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

Keats, John

17.

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

18.

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

19.

Rulers were made to be broken.

Isenberg, Michael

20.

Lawyers and woodpeckers have long bills.

Proverb

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Petty laws breed great crimes.

Ouida

24.

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

Moore, Thomas

25.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

26.

The kind of lawyer you hope the other fellow has.

Chandler, Raymond

27.

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

28.

Avoid lawsuits beyond all things; they pervert your conscience, impair your health, and dissipate your property.

La Bruyere, Jean De

29.

The law is reason, free from passion.

Aristotle

30.

The good of the people is the greatest law.

Cicero, Marcus T.

31.

Where the law ends tyranny begins.

Fielding, Henry

32.

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

Mencken, H. L.

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Johnson, Samuel

36.

The trouble with law is lawyers.

Darrow, Clarence

37.

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

Montesquieu, Charles De

38.

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

Proverb

39.

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

40.

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

Stirner, Max

41.

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

42.

Keep out of Chancery. It's being ground to bits in a slow mill; it's being roasted at a slow fire; it's being stung to death by single bees; it's being drowned by drops; it's going mad by grains.

Dickens, Charles

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

The severity of the laws prevents their execution.

Montesquieu, Charles De

48.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

49.

The law often permits what honor prohibits.

Saurin, Bernard Joseph

50.

Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.