Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

It is impossible for us to break the law. We can only break ourselves against the law.

- Mille, Cecil B. De

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

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

Thoreau, Henry David

I think we may class the lawyer in the natural history of monsters.

Keats, John

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

Irving, Washington

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

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

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

Frost, Robert

Fools and obstinate men make lawyers rich.

Proverb

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

Lafollette, Suzanne

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

10.

Are not laws dangerous which inhibit the passions? Compare the centuries of anarchy with those of the strongest legalism in any country you like and you will see that it is only when the laws are silent that the greatest actions appear.

Sade, Marquis De

11.

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

12.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

13.

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

Halifax, Edward F.

14.

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

15.

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.

16.

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

17.

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

Proverb

18.

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

19.

I know of no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their strict execution.

Grant, Ulysses S.

20.

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

Gladstone, William E.

21.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

22.

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

Puzo, Mario

23.

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

Pomerantz, Hart

24.

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

Proverb

25.

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

Mill, John Stuart

26.

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.

27.

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

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.

The severity of the laws prevents their execution.

Montesquieu, Charles De

30.

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

31.

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

Mencken, H. L.

32.

Some things are easier to legalize than to legitimate.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

Laws are not invented. They grow out of circumstances.

Azarias

37.

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.

38.

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

39.

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

40.

It is impossible for us to break the law. We can only break ourselves against the law.

Mille, Cecil B. De

41.

In law, nothing is certain but the expense.

Butler, Samuel

42.

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

43.

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

44.

Rulers were made to be broken.

Isenberg, Michael

45.

Bad laws are the worst form of tyranny.

Burke, Edmund

46.

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

Mellor, David

47.

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