Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

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

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

Laws are the sovereigns of sovereigns.

Louis XIV

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

Younger, Evelle

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

Irving, Washington

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

Puzo, Mario

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

Some things are easier to legalize than to legitimate.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

Law cannot persuade when it cannot punish.

Saying

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

Diderot, Denis

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

10.

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

Halifax, Edward F.

11.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

12.

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

13.

The law is reason, free from passion.

Aristotle

14.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

15.

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

Stirner, Max

16.

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

17.

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

Welles, Orson

18.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

19.

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

Mellor, David

20.

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

Tucker, Benjamin Ricketson

21.

Laws are not invented. They grow out of circumstances.

Azarias

22.

Whenever men take the law into their own hands, the loser is the law. And when the law loses, freedom languishes.

Kennedy, Robert F.

23.

The only road to the highest stations in this country is that of the law.

Jones, Sir William

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.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

26.

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

27.

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

Nizer, Louis

28.

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

Lafollette, Suzanne

29.

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

30.

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

31.

Where the law ends tyranny begins.

Fielding, Henry

32.

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

33.

The best laws cannot make a constitution work in spite of morals; morals can turn the worst laws to advantage. That is a commonplace truth, but one to which my studies are always bringing me back. It is the central point in my conception. I see it at the end of all my reflections.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

34.

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

35.

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

Engels, Friedrich

36.

Lawyers enjoy a little mystery, you know. Why, if everybody came forward and told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth straight out, we should all retire to the workhouse.

Sayers, Dorothy L.

37.

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

Johnson, Samuel

38.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

39.

Here lies one believe it if you can, who thought an attorney, was a honest man.

Epitaph

40.

Certainly one of the highest duties of the citizen is a scrupulous obedience to the laws of the nation. But it is not the highest duty.

Jefferson, Thomas

41.

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

Sprecht, Robert D.

42.

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

43.

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.

44.

The severity of the laws prevents their execution.

Montesquieu, Charles De

45.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

46.

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

Mill, John Stuart

47.

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

48.

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

Proverb

49.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

50.

Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.

Montesquieu, Charles De