Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

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

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

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.

Rulers were made to be broken.

Isenberg, Michael

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

Mill, John Stuart

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

The United States is the greatest law factory the world has ever known.

Hughes, Charles Evans

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

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

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

Moore, Thomas

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

10.

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

Proverb, Spanish

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

Our human laws are more or less imperfect copies of the external laws as we see them.

Froude, James A.

15.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

16.

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

Mcilvanney, William

17.

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

18.

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

Pomerantz, Hart

19.

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

Proverb

20.

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

Brougham, Lord Henry P.

21.

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

Mencken, H. L.

22.

Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.

Montesquieu, Charles De

23.

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

Goldsmith, Oliver

24.

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

25.

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

Irving, Washington

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Owen, Robert

29.

The more corrupt the state, the more laws.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

30.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

31.

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

32.

The law often permits what honor prohibits.

Saurin, Bernard Joseph

33.

Petty laws breed great crimes.

Ouida

34.

The judge is found guilty when a criminal is acquitted.

Syrus, Publilius

35.

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

36.

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

37.

Lawyers and woodpeckers have long bills.

Proverb

38.

Fish die when they are out of water, and people die without law and order.

Talmud, The

39.

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

40.

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

Voltaire

41.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

42.

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.

43.

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

Sprecht, Robert D.

44.

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

45.

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

Epitaph

46.

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

47.

Erasmus, Desiderius

48.

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

Nizer, Louis

49.

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.

50.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb