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

Martineau, Harriet

A successful lawsuit is the one worn by a policeman.

Frost, Robert

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

Bismarck, Otto Von

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.

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

Proverb

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

Moore, Thomas

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

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

Proverb, Spanish

The law is reason, free from passion.

Aristotle

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Law, without force, is impotent.

Pascal, Blaise

14.

The clearest way to show what the rule of law means to us in everyday life is to recall what has happened when there is no rule of law.

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

15.

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

Welles, Orson

16.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

17.

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

Lafollette, Suzanne

18.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

19.

A good lawyer is a bad neighbor.

Proverb, French

20.

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

21.

Some things are easier to legalize than to legitimate.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

22.

Law school taught me one thing; how to take two situations that are exactly the same and show how they are different.

Pomerantz, Hart

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

Bad laws are the worst form of tyranny.

Burke, Edmund

27.

Avoid lawsuits beyond all things; they pervert your conscience, impair your health, and dissipate your property.

La Bruyere, Jean De

28.

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

29.

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

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.

Laws are not masters, but servants, and he rules them, who obeys them.

Becker, Ward

32.

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

33.

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

Johnson, Samuel

34.

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

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady

35.

The magistrates are the ministers for the laws, the judges their interpreters, the rest of us are servants of the law, that we all may be free.

Cicero, Marcus T.

36.

The laws of each are convertible into the laws of any other.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

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

Frost, Robert

38.

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

Younger, Evelle

39.

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

Kennedy, Robert F.

40.

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

Irving, Washington

41.

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

42.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

43.

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

Froude, James A.

44.

The first thing we do, lets kill the lawyers. [Henry Iv]

Shakespeare, William

45.

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

Mellor, David

46.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

47.

The severity of the laws prevents their execution.

Montesquieu, Charles De

48.

In law, nothing is certain but the expense.

Butler, Samuel

49.

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

50.

The good of the people is the greatest law.

Cicero, Marcus T.