Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

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

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

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

Nizer, Louis

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 more corrupt the state, the more laws.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

The severity of the laws prevents their execution.

Montesquieu, Charles De

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

Petty laws breed great crimes.

Ouida

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

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady

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

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

10.

Here lies one believe it if you can, who thought an attorney, was a honest man.

Epitaph

11.

A lawyers dream of heaven; every man reclaimed his property at the resurrection, and each tried to recover it from all his forefathers.

Butler, Samuel

12.

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

13.

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

14.

Laws are not invented. They grow out of circumstances.

Azarias

15.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

16.

The kind of lawyer you hope the other fellow has.

Chandler, Raymond

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Jones, Sir William

20.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

21.

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

Mcilvanney, William

22.

Laws are the sovereigns of sovereigns.

Louis XIV

23.

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

Gladstone, William E.

24.

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.

25.

The law often permits what honor prohibits.

Saurin, Bernard Joseph

26.

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

27.

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

Proverb

28.

The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.

Crisp, Quentin

29.

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

30.

Law, without force, is impotent.

Pascal, Blaise

31.

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

Becker, Ward

32.

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

Diderot, Denis

33.

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

Johnson, Samuel

34.

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

35.

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

36.

Lawyers -- a profession it is to disguise matters.

More, Thomas

37.

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

Sprecht, Robert D.

38.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Keats, John

42.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

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

44.

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.

45.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

46.

Bad laws are the worst form of tyranny.

Burke, Edmund

47.

Law cannot persuade when it cannot punish.

Saying

48.

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

Wilson, Earl

49.

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

50.

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

Irving, Washington