Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

A good lawyer is a bad neighbor.

- Proverb, French

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

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

It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.

King Jr. Martin Luther

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

Goldsmith, Oliver

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

Froude, James A.

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

Halifax, Edward F.

The law is reason, free from passion.

Aristotle

The law often permits what honor prohibits.

Saurin, Bernard Joseph

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

Mencken, H. L.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

10.

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

11.

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

12.

He who goes to law for a sheep loses his cow.

Proverb, Spanish

13.

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

14.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

15.

The trouble with law is lawyers.

Darrow, Clarence

16.

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

17.

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

Becker, Ward

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Proverb

21.

Laws are not invented. They grow out of circumstances.

Azarias

22.

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.

23.

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.

24.

Petty laws breed great crimes.

Ouida

25.

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

26.

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

Young, Brigham

27.

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.

28.

Laws are the sovereigns of sovereigns.

Louis XIV

29.

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

30.

Rulers were made to be broken.

Isenberg, Michael

31.

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

32.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Where the law is uncertain there is no law.

Proverb

36.

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

Pope, Alexander

37.

Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.

Montesquieu, Charles De

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Keats, John

42.

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

Nizer, Louis

43.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

44.

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

Tucker, Benjamin Ricketson

45.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

46.

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

47.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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.