Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

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

- Puzo, Mario

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

The trouble with law is lawyers.

Darrow, Clarence

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

Proverb

The law often permits what honor prohibits.

Saurin, Bernard Joseph

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

Jefferson, Thomas

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

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

The only laws of matter are those that our minds must fabricate and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter.

Maxwell, James Clerk

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

Who thinks the law has anything to do with justice? It's what we have because we can't have justice.

Mcilvanney, William

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Keats, John

13.

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

14.

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

Froude, James A.

15.

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.

16.

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

17.

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

Nizer, Louis

18.

Under any conditions, anywhere, whatever you are doing, there is some ordinance under which you can be booked.

Sprecht, Robert D.

19.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

23.

Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.

Montesquieu, Charles De

24.

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

25.

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

Mellor, David

26.

Fish die when they are out of water, and people die without law and order.

Talmud, The

27.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

28.

Some things are easier to legalize than to legitimate.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

29.

In law, nothing is certain but the expense.

Butler, Samuel

30.

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

31.

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

32.

A good lawyer is a bad neighbor.

Proverb, French

33.

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

Diderot, Denis

34.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

35.

To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady

36.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

37.

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

Proverb

38.

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

Wilson, Earl

39.

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

Owen, Robert

40.

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.

41.

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

Mill, John Stuart

42.

Lawyers and woodpeckers have long bills.

Proverb

43.

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

Moore, Thomas

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

47.

Fools and obstinate men make lawyers rich.

Proverb

48.

Here lies one believe it if you can, who thought an attorney, was a honest man.

Epitaph

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.

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