Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

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

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

Diderot, Denis

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

Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.

Montesquieu, Charles De

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

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

Law, without force, is impotent.

Pascal, Blaise

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

Nizer, Louis

10.

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

Hughes, Charles Evans

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

The severity of the laws prevents their execution.

Montesquieu, Charles De

16.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

17.

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

Frost, Robert

18.

Some things are easier to legalize than to legitimate.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

19.

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

Proverb

20.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

21.

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

Wilson, Earl

22.

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

23.

The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.

Crisp, Quentin

24.

The good of the people is the greatest law.

Cicero, Marcus T.

25.

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

26.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

27.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

28.

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

Goldsmith, Oliver

29.

Bad laws are the worst form of tyranny.

Burke, Edmund

30.

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

31.

Lawyers and woodpeckers have long bills.

Proverb

32.

Laws are the sovereigns of sovereigns.

Louis XIV

33.

A successful lawsuit is the one worn by a policeman.

Frost, Robert

34.

Ignorance of the law excuses no man from practicing it.

Mizner, Addison

35.

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

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady

36.

A good lawyer is a bad neighbor.

Proverb, French

37.

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

38.

When the severity of the law is to be softened, let pity, not bribes, be the motive.

Cervantes, Miguel De

39.

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

Halifax, Edward F.

40.

The trouble with law is lawyers.

Darrow, Clarence

41.

Where the law ends tyranny begins.

Fielding, Henry

42.

Who thinks the law has anything to do with justice? It's what we have because we can't have justice.

Mcilvanney, William

43.

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

Welles, Orson

44.

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

Irving, Washington

45.

Under any conditions, anywhere, whatever you are doing, there is some ordinance under which you can be booked.

Sprecht, Robert D.

46.

Petty laws breed great crimes.

Ouida

47.

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

Shakespeare, William

48.

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

49.

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.

50.

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

Pomerantz, Hart