Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

Where the law is uncertain there is no law.

- Proverb

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

The kind of lawyer you hope the other fellow has.

Chandler, Raymond

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

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

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

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

Jones, Franklin P.

Ignorance of the law excuses no man from practicing it.

Mizner, Addison

We enact many laws that manufacture criminals, and then a few that punish them

Tucker, Benjamin Ricketson

10.

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

Mellor, David

11.

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

Bismarck, Otto Von

12.

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

13.

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

14.

The good of the people is the greatest law.

Cicero, Marcus T.

15.

Lawyers -- a profession it is to disguise matters.

More, Thomas

16.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

17.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

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.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

20.

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

Wilson, Earl

21.

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

Owen, Robert

22.

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

23.

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

Pope, Alexander

24.

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

25.

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

Trapp, June L.

26.

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

Moore, Thomas

27.

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

Lafollette, Suzanne

28.

Fools and obstinate men make lawyers rich.

Proverb

29.

The law often permits what honor prohibits.

Saurin, Bernard Joseph

30.

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

31.

We eagerly get hold of a law that serves as a weapon to our passions.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Froude, James A.

36.

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

Gladstone, William E.

37.

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

38.

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

39.

In law, nothing is certain but the expense.

Butler, Samuel

40.

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.

41.

The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime.

Stirner, Max

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

45.

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

Johnson, Samuel

46.

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

Talmud, The

47.

Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.

Engels, Friedrich

48.

Laws are not invented. They grow out of circumstances.

Azarias

49.

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

50.

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

Proverb, Spanish