Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

I know of no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their strict execution.

- Grant, Ulysses S.

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

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

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

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady

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

Proverb

The trouble with law is lawyers.

Darrow, Clarence

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

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

Bad laws are the worst form of tyranny.

Burke, Edmund

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

Jefferson, Thomas

10.

Ignorance of the law excuses no man from practicing it.

Mizner, Addison

11.

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

12.

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

Moore, Thomas

13.

Where the law is uncertain there is no law.

Proverb

14.

Petty laws breed great crimes.

Ouida

15.

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

Frost, Robert

16.

We enact many laws that manufacture criminals, and then a few that punish them

Tucker, Benjamin Ricketson

17.

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

Diderot, Denis

18.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

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.

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

21.

The law is reason, free from passion.

Aristotle

22.

Law cannot persuade when it cannot punish.

Saying

23.

God works wonders now and then; Behold a lawyer, an honest man.

Franklin, Benjamin

24.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

25.

The good of the people is the greatest law.

Cicero, Marcus T.

26.

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

Stirner, Max

27.

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

28.

Where the law ends tyranny begins.

Fielding, Henry

29.

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

30.

The more corrupt the state, the more laws.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

31.

The court is like a palace of marble; it's composed of people very hard and very polished.

La Bruyere, Jean De

32.

Certainly one of the highest duties of the citizen is a scrupulous obedience to the laws of the nation. But it is not the highest duty.

Jefferson, Thomas

33.

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

34.

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

Froude, James A.

35.

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

36.

Fools and obstinate men make lawyers rich.

Proverb

37.

Whenever men take the law into their own hands, the loser is the law. And when the law loses, freedom languishes.

Kennedy, Robert F.

38.

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

Irving, Washington

39.

The due process of law as we use it, I believe, rests squarely on the liberal idea of conflict and resolution.

Trapp, June L.

40.

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

41.

When one wanted one's interests looking after whatever the cost, it was not so well for a lawyer to be over honest, else he might not be up to other people's tricks.

Eliot, George

42.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

43.

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

44.

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

45.

A good lawyer is a bad neighbor.

Proverb, French

46.

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

Proverb, Spanish

47.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

48.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

49.

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

50.

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

Proverb