Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.

- Montesquieu, Charles De

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

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

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

Puzo, Mario

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

Johnson, Samuel

Fools and obstinate men make lawyers rich.

Proverb

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.

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

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

Where the law is uncertain there is no law.

Proverb

10.

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

Trapp, June L.

11.

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

Mellor, David

12.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

13.

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

14.

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

Nizer, Louis

15.

The severity of the laws prevents their execution.

Montesquieu, Charles De

16.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

17.

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.

18.

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

19.

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

Engels, Friedrich

20.

The law is reason, free from passion.

Aristotle

21.

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

22.

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

Hughes, Charles Evans

23.

Law cannot persuade when it cannot punish.

Saying

24.

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

25.

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

26.

Laws are not invented. They grow out of circumstances.

Azarias

27.

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

28.

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

Stirner, Max

29.

In a democracy -- even if it is a so-called democracy like our white-?litist one -- the greatest veneration one can show the rule of law is to keep a watch on it, and to reserve the right to judge unjust laws and the subversion of the function of the law by the power of the state. That vigilance is the most important proof of respect for the law.

Gordimer, Nadine

30.

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

Wilson, Earl

31.

I want to live perfectly above the law, and make it my servant instead of my master.

Young, Brigham

32.

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

Proverb

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Bismarck, Otto Von

36.

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

Kennedy, Robert F.

37.

I was never ruined but twice; once when I lost a lawsuit and once when I won one.

Voltaire

38.

I would be loath to speak ill of any person who I do not know deserves it, but I am afraid he is an attorney.