Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

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

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

The good of the people is the greatest law.

Cicero, Marcus T.

A successful lawsuit is the one worn by a policeman.

Frost, Robert

Laws are not invented. They grow out of circumstances.

Azarias

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

Goldsmith, Oliver

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

Thoreau, Henry David

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

Diderot, Denis

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

Where the law ends tyranny begins.

Fielding, Henry

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

10.

I want to live perfectly above the law, and make it my servant instead of my master.

Young, Brigham

11.

Law cannot persuade when it cannot punish.

Saying

12.

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.

13.

The severity of the laws prevents their execution.

Montesquieu, Charles De

14.

The law often permits what honor prohibits.

Saurin, Bernard Joseph

15.

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

16.

The first thing we do, lets kill the lawyers. [Henry Iv]

Shakespeare, William

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Pomerantz, Hart

20.

The judge is found guilty when a criminal is acquitted.

Syrus, Publilius

21.

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

Lafollette, Suzanne

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

25.

Where the law is uncertain there is no law.

Proverb

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Nizer, Louis

29.

The trouble with law is lawyers.

Darrow, Clarence

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.

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

32.

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

33.

Laws are the sovereigns of sovereigns.

Louis XIV

34.

A good lawyer is a bad neighbor.

Proverb, French

35.

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

36.

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

Irving, Washington

37.

It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.

King Jr. Martin Luther

38.

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.

39.

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

40.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

41.

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.

42.

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

Owen, Robert

43.

The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.

Crisp, Quentin

44.

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

45.

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

Keats, John

46.

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

Mille, Cecil B. De

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.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Halifax, Edward F.