Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for law, so much as a respect for right.

- Thoreau, Henry David

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

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

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

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

Nizer, Louis

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

Brougham, Lord Henry P.

It is impossible for us to break the law. We can only break ourselves against the law.

Mille, Cecil B. De

An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so.

Gandhi, Mahatma

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

If lawyers are disbarred and clergymen defrocked, doesn't it follow that electricians can be delighted, musicians denoted, cowboys deranged, models deposed, tree surgeons debarked, and dry cleaners depressed.

Ostman, Virginia

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

10.

A successful lawsuit is the one worn by a policeman.

Frost, Robert

11.

The trouble with law is lawyers.

Darrow, Clarence

12.

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

13.

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

Lafollette, Suzanne

14.

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

Keats, John

15.

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

16.

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

Wilson, Earl

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.

Petty laws breed great crimes.

Ouida

19.

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.

20.

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

Irving, Washington

21.

In law, nothing is certain but the expense.

Butler, Samuel

22.

The law often permits what honor prohibits.

Saurin, Bernard Joseph

23.

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

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.

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

26.

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

Johnson, Samuel

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

No civilization would ever have been possible without a framework of stability, to provide the wherein for the flux of change. Foremost among the stabilizing factors, more enduring than customs, manners and traditions, are the legal systems that regulate our life in the world and our daily affairs with each other.

Arendt, Hannah

31.

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

Stirner, Max

32.

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

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.

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.

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

36.

The only road to the highest stations in this country is that of the law.

Jones, Sir William

37.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

38.

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

Proverb, Spanish

39.

Our demands are simple, normal, and therefore they are difficult to satisfy. All we ask is that an actor on the stage live in accordance with natural laws

Stanislavisky, Konstantin

40.

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

41.

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

Mcilvanney, William

42.

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

Lieberman, Gerald F.

43.

Lawyers and woodpeckers have long bills.

Proverb

44.

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

45.

The judge is found guilty when a criminal is acquitted.

Syrus, Publilius

46.

Lawyers -- a profession it is to disguise matters.

More, Thomas

47.

We eagerly get hold of a law that serves as a weapon to our passions.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

48.

Fools and obstinate men make lawyers rich.