Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

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.

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

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

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

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

Welles, Orson

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

Pomerantz, Hart

Lawyers and woodpeckers have long bills.

Proverb

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

Proverb

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

Mellor, David

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

Mencken, H. L.

In law, nothing is certain but the expense.

Butler, Samuel

10.

The judge is found guilty when a criminal is acquitted.

Syrus, Publilius

11.

Law, without force, is impotent.

Pascal, Blaise

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Becker, Ward

15.

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

Moore, Thomas

16.

Where the law is uncertain there is no law.

Proverb

17.

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

Mill, John Stuart

18.

Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.

Montesquieu, Charles De

19.

Rulers were made to be broken.

Isenberg, Michael

20.

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

Montesquieu, Charles De

21.

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

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

22.

God works wonders now and then; Behold a lawyer, an honest man.

Franklin, Benjamin

23.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

24.

Lawyers -- a profession it is to disguise matters.

More, Thomas

25.

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

Irving, Washington

26.

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

Tucker, Benjamin Ricketson

27.

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

Halifax, Edward F.

28.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

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.

Certainly one of the highest duties of the citizen is a scrupulous obedience to the laws of the nation. But it is not the highest duty.

Jefferson, Thomas

31.

It is unfair to believe everything we hear about lawyers, some of it might not be true.

Lieberman, Gerald F.

32.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

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.

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.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

40.

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

Johnson, Samuel

41.

Law and equity are two things which God has joined, but which man has put asunder.

Colton, Charles Caleb

42.

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

43.

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.

44.

The law isn't justice. It's a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.

Chandler, Raymond

45.

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.

46.

Laws are felt only when the individual comes into conflict with them.

Lafollette, Suzanne

47.

The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.

Crisp, Quentin

48.

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

Bismarck, Otto Von

49.

Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.

King Jr. Martin Luther

50.

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

Mcilvanney, William