Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

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

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

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

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady

Rulers were made to be broken.

Isenberg, Michael

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

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

Moore, Thomas

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

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

Some things are easier to legalize than to legitimate.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

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

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

Proverb

10.

Lawyers and woodpeckers have long bills.

Proverb

11.

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.

12.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

13.

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

Welles, Orson

14.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

15.

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

16.

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

Frost, Robert

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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.

20.

Law, without force, is impotent.

Pascal, Blaise

21.

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

Proverb

22.

Bad laws are the worst form of tyranny.

Burke, Edmund

23.

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

24.

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

Mill, John Stuart

25.

Ignorance of the law excuses no man from practicing it.

Mizner, Addison

26.

Martineau, Harriet

27.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

28.

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

Lafollette, Suzanne

29.

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

Mcilvanney, William

30.

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

31.

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

32.

The more corrupt the state, the more laws.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

33.

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

Halifax, Edward F.

34.

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

Talmud, The

35.

The law often permits what honor prohibits.

Saurin, Bernard Joseph

36.

A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.

Puzo, Mario

37.

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

38.

Lawyers are like rhinoceroses: thick skinned, short-sighted, and always ready to charge.

Mellor, David

39.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

40.

The severity of the laws prevents their execution.

Montesquieu, Charles De

41.

Lawyers -- a profession it is to disguise matters.

More, Thomas

42.

Lawyers know life practically. A bookish man should always have them to converse with.

Johnson, Samuel

43.

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

44.

The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.

Crisp, Quentin

45.

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

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

46.

Laws are the sovereigns of sovereigns.

Louis XIV

47.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

48.

I said there was a society of men among us, bred up from their youth in the art of proving by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black, and black is white, according as they are paid. To this society all the rest of the people are as slaves.

Swift, Jonathan

49.

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

50.

I want to live perfectly above the law, and make it my servant instead of my master.

Young, Brigham