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

Ignorance of the law excuses no man from practicing it.

Mizner, Addison

The severity of the laws prevents their execution.

Montesquieu, Charles De

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

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

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

Gladstone, William E.

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

Wilson, Earl

The law is reason, free from passion.

Aristotle

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.

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.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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.

15.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

16.

It is unfair to believe everything we hear about lawyers, some of it might not be true.

Lieberman, Gerald F.

17.

Lawyers and woodpeckers have long bills.

Proverb

18.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

19.

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

Mencken, H. L.

20.

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

Jones, Sir William

21.

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

Mill, John Stuart

22.

In law, nothing is certain but the expense.

Butler, Samuel

23.

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

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady

24.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Law cannot persuade when it cannot punish.

Saying

28.

If the laws could speak for themselves, they would complain of the lawyers.

Halifax, Edward F.

29.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

30.

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

Proverb

31.

Laws are not invented. They grow out of circumstances.

Azarias

32.

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

33.

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

Hughes, Charles Evans

34.

The more corrupt the state, the more laws.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

35.

There is no nation so powerful, as the one that obeys its laws not from principles of fear or reason, but from passion.

Montesquieu, Charles De

36.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

37.

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

Frost, Robert

38.

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

39.

Some things are easier to legalize than to legitimate.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

40.

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

Owen, Robert

41.

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

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

42.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

43.

It is impossible for us to break the law. We can only break ourselves against the law.

Mille, Cecil B. De

44.

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

45.

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.

46.

Petty laws breed great crimes.

Ouida

47.

All breathing, existing, living, sentient creatures should not be slain nor treated with violence, nor abused, nor tormented, nor driven away. This is the pure unchangeable law.

Sutrakritanga

48.

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

Bismarck, Otto Von

49.

A successful lawsuit is the one worn by a policeman.

Frost, Robert

50.

Fools and obstinate men make lawyers rich.

Proverb