Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

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

- Proverb

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

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

Proverb, Spanish

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

When one wanted one's interests looking after whatever the cost, it was not so well for a lawyer to be over honest, else he might not be up to other people's tricks.

Eliot, George

Laws are the sovereigns of sovereigns.

Louis XIV

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

Talmud, The

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

Nizer, Louis

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

I was never ruined but twice; once when I lost a lawsuit and once when I won one.

Voltaire

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

Mencken, H. L.

10.

A lawyer is a gentlemen that rescues your estate from your enemies and then keeps it to himself.

Brougham, Lord Henry P.

11.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

12.

The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.

Crisp, Quentin

13.

Where the law ends tyranny begins.

Fielding, Henry

14.

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

Welles, Orson

15.

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.

16.

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

17.

Fools and obstinate men make lawyers rich.

Proverb

18.

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

Froude, James A.

19.

Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.

Montesquieu, Charles De

20.

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

21.

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

Bismarck, Otto Von

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

25.

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

26.

It would be better to have no laws at all, than to have too many.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

27.

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

Young, Brigham

28.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

29.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

30.

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

Younger, Evelle

31.

The law often permits what honor prohibits.

Saurin, Bernard Joseph

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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.

35.

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

36.

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

37.

The judge is found guilty when a criminal is acquitted.

Syrus, Publilius

38.

Lawyers and woodpeckers have long bills.

Proverb

39.

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

Wilson, Earl

40.

Bad laws are the worst form of tyranny.

Burke, Edmund

41.

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

42.

The more corrupt the state, the more laws.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

43.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Petty laws breed great crimes.

Ouida

47.

Lawyers -- a profession it is to disguise matters.

More, Thomas

48.

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