Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

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

- Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

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

Irving, Washington

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

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

Welles, Orson

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

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

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.

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

Diderot, Denis

Where the law ends tyranny begins.

Fielding, Henry

10.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

11.

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

Puzo, Mario

12.

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

Halifax, Edward F.

13.

Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.

Montesquieu, Charles De

14.

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

Owen, Robert

15.

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

Stirner, Max

16.

The jury consist of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.

Frost, Robert

17.

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

18.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

19.

The law is reason, free from passion.

Aristotle

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Wilson, Earl

23.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

24.

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.

25.

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

Froude, James A.

26.

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

27.

Law cannot persuade when it cannot punish.

Saying

28.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

29.

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

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady

30.

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

31.

The kind of lawyer you hope the other fellow has.

Chandler, Raymond

32.

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

Mcilvanney, William

33.

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.

34.

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

Pomerantz, Hart

35.

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

36.

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

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

37.

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

Mellor, David

38.

Lawyers and woodpeckers have long bills.

Proverb

39.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

43.

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

Mill, John Stuart

44.

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

Goldsmith, Oliver

45.

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

46.

The good of the people is the greatest law.

Cicero, Marcus T.

47.

Ignorance of the law excuses no man from practicing it.

Mizner, Addison

48.

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

49.

Laws are the sovereigns of sovereigns.

Louis XIV

50.

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