Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

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

- Stanton, Elizabeth Cady

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.

Engels, Friedrich

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

Montesquieu, Charles De

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

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

The United States is the greatest law factory the world has ever known.

Hughes, Charles Evans

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

Pope, Alexander

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

Younger, Evelle

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

Pomerantz, Hart

The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime.

Stirner, Max

10.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

11.

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

12.

Petty laws breed great crimes.

Ouida

13.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

17.

Law, without force, is impotent.

Pascal, Blaise

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Diderot, Denis

21.

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

22.

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

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

23.

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

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady

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.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

26.

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

27.

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

Proverb, Spanish

28.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

29.

The judge is found guilty when a criminal is acquitted.

Syrus, Publilius

30.

We should have learnt by now that laws and court decisions can only point the way. They can establish criteria of right and wrong. And they can provide a basis for rooting out the evils of bigotry and racism. But they cannot wipe away centuries of oppression and injustice -- however much we might desire it.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

31.

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

32.

Lawyers -- a profession it is to disguise matters.

More, Thomas

33.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

34.

Some things are easier to legalize than to legitimate.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

35.

Where the law ends tyranny begins.

Fielding, Henry

36.

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

Lieberman, Gerald F.

37.

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

Brougham, Lord Henry P.

38.

A good lawyer is a bad neighbor.

Proverb, French

39.

Laws too gentle, are seldom obeyed; too severe, seldom executed.

Franklin, Benjamin

40.

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

Johnson, Samuel

41.

Lawyers and woodpeckers have long bills.

Proverb

42.

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

Welles, Orson

43.

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

Epitaph

44.

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.

45.

Where the law is uncertain there is no law.

Proverb

46.

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

Lafollette, Suzanne

47.

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

Tucker, Benjamin Ricketson

48.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

49.

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

Moore, Thomas

50.

Even an attorney of moderate talent can postpone doomsday year after year, for the system of appeals that pervades American jurisprudence amounts to a legalistic wheel of fortune, a game of chance, somewhat fixed in the favor of the criminal, that the participants play interminably.

Capote, Truman