Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

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

- Younger, Evelle

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

Fools and obstinate men make lawyers rich.

Proverb

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

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

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

Halifax, Edward F.

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

Brougham, Lord Henry P.

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

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

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

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

Thoreau, Henry David

10.

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

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady

11.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

12.

The law often permits what honor prohibits.

Saurin, Bernard Joseph

13.

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

Diderot, Denis

14.

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

Wilson, Earl

15.

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

Mellor, David

16.

Rulers were made to be broken.

Isenberg, Michael

17.

Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.

Montesquieu, Charles De

18.

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

Mille, Cecil B. De

19.

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

20.

The kind of lawyer you hope the other fellow has.

Chandler, Raymond

21.

Where the law ends tyranny begins.

Fielding, Henry

22.

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

Mcilvanney, William

23.

A good lawyer is a bad neighbor.

Proverb, French

24.

A successful lawsuit is the one worn by a policeman.

Frost, Robert

25.

Those laws, being forged for universal application, are in perpetual conflict with personal interest, just as personal interest is always in contradiction with the general interest. Good for society, our laws are very bad for the individuals whereof it is composed; for, if they one time protect the individual, they hinder, trouble, fetter him for three quarters of his life.

Sade, Marquis De

26.

The good of the people is the greatest law.

Cicero, Marcus T.

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

The trouble with law is lawyers.

Darrow, Clarence

32.

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

Nizer, Louis

33.

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

34.

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

Engels, Friedrich

35.

Laws are not invented. They grow out of circumstances.

Azarias

36.

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

Owen, Robert

37.

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

38.

Are not laws dangerous which inhibit the passions? Compare the centuries of anarchy with those of the strongest legalism in any country you like and you will see that it is only when the laws are silent that the greatest actions appear.

Sade, Marquis De

39.

The good lawyer is not the man who has an eye to every side and angle of contingency, and qualifies all his qualifications, but who throws himself on your part so heartily, that he can get you out of a scrape.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

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

41.

Lawyers -- a profession it is to disguise matters.

More, Thomas

42.

Whenever men take the law into their own hands, the loser is the law. And when the law loses, freedom languishes.

Kennedy, Robert F.

43.

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

Lafollette, Suzanne

44.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

45.

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

Becker, Ward

46.

I was never ruined but twice; once when I lost a lawsuit and once when I won one.

Voltaire

47.

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

48.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

49.

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

50.

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