Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

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

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

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

Proverb

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

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

Younger, Evelle

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

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

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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

Fools and obstinate men make lawyers rich.

Proverb

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

Stirner, Max

10.

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

11.

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

Wilson, Earl

12.

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

Nizer, Louis

13.

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

14.

Some things are easier to legalize than to legitimate.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

15.

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

Pope, Alexander

16.

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

Goldsmith, Oliver

17.

Our demands are simple, normal, and therefore they are difficult to satisfy. All we ask is that an actor on the stage live in accordance with natural laws

Stanislavisky, Konstantin

18.

No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be within the law? The law is stationary. The law is fixed. The law is a chariot wheel which binds us all regardless of conditions or place or time.

Goldman, Emma

19.

Rulers were made to be broken.

Isenberg, Michael

20.

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

Kennedy, Robert F.

21.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

22.

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

Frost, Robert

23.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

24.

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

Owen, Robert

25.

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

Voltaire

26.

Where the law ends tyranny begins.

Fielding, Henry

27.

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.

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.

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

Mencken, H. L.

30.

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

31.

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

Moore, Thomas

32.

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

Epitaph

33.

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

34.

The law is reason, free from passion.

Aristotle

35.

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

Halifax, Edward F.

36.

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

37.

The more corrupt the state, the more laws.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

44.

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

Talmud, The

45.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

46.

Laws are the sovereigns of sovereigns.

Louis XIV

47.

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

48.

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

Froude, James A.

49.

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

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

50.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De