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

If lawyers are disbarred and clergymen defrocked, doesn't it follow that electricians can be delighted, musicians denoted, cowboys deranged, models deposed, tree surgeons debarked, and dry cleaners depressed.

Ostman, Virginia

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

The severity of the laws prevents their execution.

Montesquieu, Charles De

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

Mencken, H. L.

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

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

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

Pomerantz, Hart

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

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

Hughes, Charles Evans

10.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

11.

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

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady

12.

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

Bismarck, Otto Von

13.

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

14.

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

Younger, Evelle

15.

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

Wilson, Earl

16.

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

Gladstone, William E.

17.

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

Goldsmith, Oliver

18.

In law, nothing is certain but the expense.

Butler, Samuel

19.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

20.

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

21.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

22.

The law is reason, free from passion.

Aristotle

23.

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

24.

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

25.

A good lawyer is a bad neighbor.

Proverb, French

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Owen, Robert

29.

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

Lafollette, Suzanne

30.

Bad laws are the worst form of tyranny.

Burke, Edmund

31.

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

32.

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

Welles, Orson

33.

Petty laws breed great crimes.

Ouida

34.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

35.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

36.

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

Nizer, Louis

37.

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

Moore, Thomas

38.

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

39.

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

Puzo, Mario

40.

The due process of law as we use it, I believe, rests squarely on the liberal idea of conflict and resolution.

Trapp, June L.

41.

The decisions of law courts should never be printed: in the long run, they form a counter authority to the law.

Diderot, Denis

42.

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

Pope, Alexander

43.

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

Talmud, The

44.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

45.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

46.

Law, without force, is impotent.

Pascal, Blaise

47.

It is difficult to make our material condition better by the best law, but it is easy enough to ruin it by bad laws.

Roosevelt, Theodore

48.

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

49.

Some things are easier to legalize than to legitimate.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

50.

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