Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

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

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

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

Puzo, Mario

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

Trapp, June L.

I have enforced the law against killing certain animals and many others, but the greatest progress of righteousness among men comes from the exhortation in favor of non-injury to life and abstention from killing living beings.

Asoka

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

Mellor, David

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.

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

Pomerantz, Hart

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

Nizer, Louis

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

Proverb

Laws are the sovereigns of sovereigns.

Louis XIV

10.

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

Gladstone, William E.

11.

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

Lafollette, Suzanne

12.

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.

13.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

14.

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

15.

The more corrupt the state, the more laws.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

16.

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

Epitaph

17.

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

Bismarck, Otto Von

18.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

19.

In law, nothing is certain but the expense.

Butler, Samuel

20.

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.

21.

The severity of the laws prevents their execution.

Montesquieu, Charles De

22.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

23.

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

24.

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

Halifax, Edward F.

25.

The law often permits what honor prohibits.

Saurin, Bernard Joseph

26.

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

27.

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

Hughes, Charles Evans

28.

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

29.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

30.

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

Irving, Washington

31.

Law, without force, is impotent.

Pascal, Blaise

32.

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

Johnson, Samuel

33.

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

Mill, John Stuart

34.

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

Brougham, Lord Henry P.

35.

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

36.

Lawyers and woodpeckers have long bills.

Proverb

37.

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

38.

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.

39.

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

Tucker, Benjamin Ricketson

40.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

41.

It is unfair to believe everything we hear about lawyers, some of it might not be true.

Lieberman, Gerald F.

42.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

43.

It is impossible for us to break the law. We can only break ourselves against the law.

Mille, Cecil B. De

44.

The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.

Crisp, Quentin

45.

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

46.

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

Mencken, H. L.

47.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

48.

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

49.

Judges ought to be more learned than witty, more reverent than plausible, and more advised than confident. Above all things, integrity is their portion and proper virtue.

Bacon, Francis

50.

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