Motivational Quotes

Law and lawyers

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

- Proverb

Best Quotes about Law and lawyers

The more corrupt the state, the more laws.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

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.

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

Irving, Washington

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

Whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest individual without having to pay the penalty for it.

Thoreau, Henry David

The law often permits what honor prohibits.

Saurin, Bernard Joseph

The only laws of matter are those that our minds must fabricate and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter.

Maxwell, James Clerk

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

Frost, Robert

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

10.

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

Mill, John Stuart

11.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

12.

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

Goldsmith, Oliver

13.

A successful lawsuit is the one worn by a policeman.

Frost, Robert

14.

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

Gladstone, William E.

15.

The law is reason, free from passion.

Aristotle

16.

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

Bismarck, Otto Von

17.

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

Lafollette, Suzanne

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

21.

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

22.

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.

23.

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.

24.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

25.

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

Wilson, Earl

26.

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

27.

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

Shakespeare, William

28.

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.

29.

I was never ruined but twice; once when I lost a lawsuit and once when I won one.

Voltaire

30.

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

31.

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

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

32.

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

33.

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

Pomerantz, Hart

34.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

35.

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

36.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

37.

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

38.

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

Talmud, The

39.

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

Kennedy, Robert F.

40.

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

Keats, John

41.

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

Younger, Evelle

42.

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

43.

The spirit of moderation should also be the spirit of the lawgiver.

Montesquieu, Charles De

44.

Lawyers -- a profession it is to disguise matters.

More, Thomas

45.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

46.

The court is like a palace of marble; it's composed of people very hard and very polished.

La Bruyere, Jean De

47.

God works wonders now and then; Behold a lawyer, an honest man.

Franklin, Benjamin

48.

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

49.

Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.

King Jr. Martin Luther

50.

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