Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

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

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

The law helps those who watch, not those who sleep.

Proverb

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

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

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

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.

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.

Scarcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved, sooner or later, into a judicial question.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

The law often permits what honor prohibits.

Saurin, Bernard Joseph

Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.

King Jr. Martin Luther

10.

Lawyers -- a profession it is to disguise matters.

More, Thomas

11.

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

Montesquieu, Charles De

12.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

13.

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

Keats, John

14.

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

Frost, Robert

15.

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

Stirner, Max

16.

Fools and obstinate men make lawyers rich.

Proverb

17.

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

Mcilvanney, William

18.

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

19.

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

20.

The kind of lawyer you hope the other fellow has.

Chandler, Raymond

21.

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.

22.

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

Nizer, Louis

23.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

24.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

25.

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

26.

Laws are not invented. They grow out of circumstances.

Azarias

27.

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

28.

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

Mencken, H. L.

29.

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

30.

Where the law ends tyranny begins.

Fielding, Henry

31.

The trouble with law is lawyers.

Darrow, Clarence

32.

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

Mill, John Stuart

33.

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

34.

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

Sprecht, Robert D.

35.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

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.

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

Lafollette, Suzanne

38.

Asoka

39.

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

Proverb, Spanish

40.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

I would uphold the law if for no other reason but to protect myself.

Moore, Thomas

45.

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

Owen, Robert

46.

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

47.

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

Gladstone, William E.

48.

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

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

49.

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

50.

The laws of each are convertible into the laws of any other.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo