Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

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

- Talmud, The

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

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

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

Trapp, June L.

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

No civilization would ever have been possible without a framework of stability, to provide the wherein for the flux of change. Foremost among the stabilizing factors, more enduring than customs, manners and traditions, are the legal systems that regulate our life in the world and our daily affairs with each other.

Arendt, Hannah

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

Talmud, The

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

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

The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science, that smiles in yer face while it picks yer pocket: and the glorious uncertainty of it is of more use to the professors than the justice of it.

Macklin, Charles

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

10.

Rulers were made to be broken.

Isenberg, Michael

11.

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

12.

In a state where corruption abounds, laws must be very numerous.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

13.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

14.

The good of the people is the greatest law.

Cicero, Marcus T.

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Irving, Washington

18.

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.

19.

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

Keats, John

20.

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

Sprecht, Robert D.

21.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

22.

The law often permits what honor prohibits.

Saurin, Bernard Joseph

23.

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

Kennedy, Robert F.

24.

Lawyers -- a profession it is to disguise matters.

More, Thomas

25.

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

Jones, Sir William

26.

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

27.

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

Diderot, Denis

28.

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

Mencken, H. L.

29.

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

30.

Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.

Montesquieu, Charles De

31.

A good lawyer is a bad neighbor.

Proverb, French

32.

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.

33.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

34.

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

Proverb, Spanish

35.

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

36.

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

Wilson, Earl

37.

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

Pomerantz, Hart

38.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

39.

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

40.

Lawyers and woodpeckers have long bills.

Proverb

41.

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

Proverb

42.

The law is reason, free from passion.

Aristotle

43.

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