Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

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

- Talmud, The

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

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

Mencken, H. L.

Good laws make it easier to do right and harder to do wrong.

Gladstone, William E.

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

Law cannot persuade when it cannot punish.

Saying

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

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

The severity of the laws prevents their execution.

Montesquieu, Charles De

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

Hughes, Charles Evans

Ignorance of the law excuses no man from practicing it.

Mizner, Addison

10.

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

Puzo, Mario

11.

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

Pomerantz, Hart

12.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

13.

The kind of lawyer you hope the other fellow has.

Chandler, Raymond

14.

Lawyers and woodpeckers have long bills.

Proverb

15.

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

16.

The law often permits what honor prohibits.

Saurin, Bernard Joseph

17.

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

18.

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

19.

In law, nothing is certain but the expense.

Butler, Samuel

20.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

21.

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

Becker, Ward

22.

Law, without force, is impotent.

Pascal, Blaise

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Sprecht, Robert D.

26.

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

27.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

28.

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

Nizer, Louis

29.

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

30.

The more corrupt the state, the more laws.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

31.

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

Engels, Friedrich

32.

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

33.

Some things are easier to legalize than to legitimate.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

34.

Fools and obstinate men make lawyers rich.

Proverb

35.

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

36.

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

Diderot, Denis

37.

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

38.

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

Welles, Orson

39.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

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

Wilson, Earl

43.

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

Brougham, Lord Henry P.

44.

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

45.

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

Montesquieu, Charles De

46.

The law is reason, free from passion.

Aristotle

47.

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

48.

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

Froude, James A.

49.

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

Younger, Evelle

50.

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

Goldsmith, Oliver