Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

Laws are like sausages. It is better not to see them being made.

- Bismarck, Otto Von

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

The more corrupt the state, the more laws.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

Where the law ends tyranny begins.

Fielding, Henry

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

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

Wilson, Earl

Lawyers and painters can soon make what's black, white.

Proverb

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

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

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

Pomerantz, Hart

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

10.

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

11.

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

Young, Brigham

12.

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

Owen, Robert

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Keats, John

16.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

17.

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.

18.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

19.

Avoid lawsuits beyond all things; they pervert your conscience, impair your health, and dissipate your property.

La Bruyere, Jean De

20.

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

21.

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

Goldsmith, Oliver

22.

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

Becker, Ward

23.

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

24.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

25.

This is a court of law young man, not a court of justice.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

26.

Fools and obstinate men make lawyers rich.

Proverb

27.

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

Moore, Thomas

28.

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

29.

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

Stirner, Max

30.

I would be loath to speak ill of any person who I do not know deserves it, but I am afraid he is an attorney.

Johnson, Samuel

31.

We may not all break the Ten Commandments, but we are certainly all capable of it. Within us lurks the breaker of all laws, ready to spring out at the first real opportunity.

Duncan, Isadora

32.

The good of the people is the greatest law.

Cicero, Marcus T.

33.

It is difficult to make our material condition better by the best law, but it is easy enough to ruin it by bad laws.

Roosevelt, Theodore

34.

A successful lawsuit is the one worn by a policeman.

Frost, Robert

35.

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

36.

Laws are like sausages. It is better not to see them being made.

Bismarck, Otto Von

37.

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

38.

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

Younger, Evelle

39.

The judge is found guilty when a criminal is acquitted.

Syrus, Publilius

40.

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

41.

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

Gladstone, William E.

42.

Curse on all laws, but those that love has made.

Pope, Alexander

43.

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

44.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

45.

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

Nizer, Louis

46.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

47.

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

Proverb

48.

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

49.

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.

50.

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