Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

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

- Proverb

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

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

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

Mille, Cecil B. De

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

Montesquieu, Charles De

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

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

Shakespeare, William

Fools and obstinate men make lawyers rich.

Proverb

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

Keats, John

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

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

Proverb

10.

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

Younger, Evelle

11.

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.

12.

Ignorance of the law excuses no man from practicing it.

Mizner, Addison

13.

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

Pomerantz, Hart

14.

Where the law ends tyranny begins.

Fielding, Henry

15.

The judge is found guilty when a criminal is acquitted.

Syrus, Publilius

16.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

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.

Bad laws are the worst form of tyranny.

Burke, Edmund

19.

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

Tucker, Benjamin Ricketson

20.

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

Welles, Orson

21.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

22.

A lawyer is a gentlemen that rescues your estate from your enemies and then keeps it to himself.

Brougham, Lord Henry P.

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

26.

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

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.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Puzo, Mario

32.

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

33.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

34.

The kind of lawyer you hope the other fellow has.

Chandler, Raymond

35.

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

Diderot, Denis

36.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

37.

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

Mencken, H. L.

38.

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

39.

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

Trapp, June L.

40.

Anybody who thinks talk is cheap should get some legal advice.

Jones, Franklin P.

41.

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

42.

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

Mellor, David

43.

Laws are not masters, but servants, and he rules them, who obeys them.

Becker, Ward

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.

Law, without force, is impotent.

Pascal, Blaise

46.

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

Halifax, Edward F.

47.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

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.

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

Mill, John Stuart

50.

Laws are the sovereigns of sovereigns.

Louis XIV