Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

Petty laws breed great crimes.

- Ouida

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

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

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.

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

Johnson, Samuel

An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so.

Gandhi, Mahatma

Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.

Montesquieu, Charles De

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

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

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

Voltaire

Young lawyers attend the courts, not because they have business there, but because they have no business.

Irving, Washington

10.

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.

11.

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

12.

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

Diderot, Denis

13.

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

14.

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

Moore, Thomas

15.

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

16.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

17.

Lawyers and woodpeckers have long bills.

Proverb

18.

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.

Johnson, Samuel

19.

The laws and the stage, both are a form of exhibitionism.

Welles, Orson

20.

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

21.

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

22.

The law is reason, free from passion.

Aristotle

23.

It is impossible for us to break the law. We can only break ourselves against the law.

Mille, Cecil B. De

24.

Fools and obstinate men make lawyers rich.

Proverb

25.

In law, nothing is certain but the expense.

Butler, Samuel

26.

Ignorance of the law excuses no man from practicing it.

Mizner, Addison

27.

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

28.

I know of no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their strict execution.

Grant, Ulysses S.

29.

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

30.

Petty laws breed great crimes.

Ouida

31.

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

Pomerantz, Hart

32.

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

Goldsmith, Oliver

33.

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

Owen, Robert

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.

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

Froude, James A.

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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.

40.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

41.

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

42.

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

Trapp, June L.

43.

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.

44.

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

45.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

46.

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

Pope, Alexander

47.

Good laws make it easier to do right and harder to do wrong.

Gladstone, William E.

48.

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

49.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

50.

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

Mellor, David