Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

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

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

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

Proverb, Spanish

Laws are felt only when the individual comes into conflict with them.

Lafollette, Suzanne

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

Sprecht, Robert D.

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

Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.

Montesquieu, Charles De

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

Anybody who thinks talk is cheap should get some legal advice.

Jones, Franklin P.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

The good of the people is the greatest law.

Cicero, Marcus T.

10.

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

11.

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.

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Rulers were made to be broken.

Isenberg, Michael

17.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

18.

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

Proverb

19.

Laws are the sovereigns of sovereigns.

Louis XIV

20.

Ignorance of the law excuses no man from practicing it.

Mizner, Addison

21.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

22.

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

23.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

24.

The severity of the laws prevents their execution.

Montesquieu, Charles De

25.

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.

26.

The spirit of moderation should also be the spirit of the lawgiver.

Montesquieu, Charles De

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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.

30.

The good lawyer is not the man who has an eye to every side and angle of contingency, and qualifies all his qualifications, but who throws himself on your part so heartily, that he can get you out of a scrape.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

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

32.

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

33.

The more corrupt the state, the more laws.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

34.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

35.

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

Tucker, Benjamin Ricketson

36.

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

37.

Lincoln, Abraham

38.

The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.

Crisp, Quentin

39.

Law cannot persuade when it cannot punish.

Saying

40.

The laws and the stage, both are a form of exhibitionism.

Welles, Orson

41.

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

Goldsmith, Oliver

42.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

43.

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

44.

In law, nothing is certain but the expense.

Butler, Samuel

45.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

46.

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

Irving, Washington

47.

I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis on the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.