Quotes about law-and-lawyers

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

Law is a bottomless pit.

— John Arbuthnot

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.

— Hannah Arendt

The law is reason, free from passion.

— Aristotle

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

Laws are not invented. They grow out of circumstances.

— Azarias

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.

— Francis Bacon

Our law very often reminds one of those outskirts of cities where you cannot for a long time tell how the streets come to wind about in so capricious and serpent-like a manner. At last it strikes you that they grew up, house by house, on the devious tracks of the old green lanes; and if you follow on to the existing fields, you may often find the change half complete.

— Walter Bagehot

Laws are not masters, but servants, and he rules them, who obeys them.

— Ward Becker

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

— Henry Ward Beecher

Every law is an infraction of liberty.

— Jeremy Bentham

Lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law is not punished.

— Jeremy Bentham

The law is light.

— Bible

Where there is no law there is no transgression.

— Bible

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

— Otto Von Bismarck

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.

— Bertolt Brecht

A lawyer starts life giving $500 worth of law for $5 and ends giving $5 worth for $500.

— Benjamin Brewster

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

— Lord Henry P. Brougham

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.

— Edmund Burke

Bad laws are the worst form of tyranny.

— Edmund Burke

In effect, to follow, not to force the public inclination; to give a direction, a form, a technical dress, and a specific sanction, to the general sense of the community, is the true end of legislature.

— Edmund Burke

Laws, like houses, lean on one another.

— Edmund Burke

There is but one law for all, namely that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity -- the law of nature and of nations.

— Edmund Burke

A lawyers dream of heaven; every man reclaimed his property at the resurrection, and each tried to recover it from all his forefathers.

— Samuel Butler

In law, nothing is certain but the expense.

— Samuel Butler

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.

— Helen M. Cam

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.

— Truman Capote

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

— Miguel De Cervantes

Some things are easier to legalize than to legitimate.

— Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort

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.

— Raymond Chandler

The kind of lawyer you hope the other fellow has.

— Raymond Chandler

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.

— Marcus T. Cicero

The good of the people is the greatest law.

— Marcus T. Cicero

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

— Charles Caleb Colton

I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis on the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.

— Calvin Coolidge

The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.

— Quentin Crisp

The trouble with law is lawyers.

— Clarence Darrow

If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers.

— Charles Dickens

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.

— Charles Dickens

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

— Denis Diderot

I haven't committed a crime. What I did was fail to comply with the law.

— David Dinkins

When men are pure, laws are useless; when men are corrupt, laws are broken.

— Benjamin Disraeli

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.

— Isadora Duncan

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.

— Dwight D. Eisenhower

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.

— George Eliot

Good men must not obey the laws too well.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which perishes in the twisting.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

— Friedrich Engels

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

— Epitaph

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.

— Desiderius Erasmus

Where the law ends tyranny begins.

— Henry Fielding

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

— Benjamin Franklin

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

— Benjamin Franklin

A successful lawsuit is the one worn by a policeman.

— Robert Frost

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

— Robert Frost

Our human laws are more or less imperfect copies of the external laws as we see them.

— James A. Froude

An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so.

— Mahatma Gandhi

A fox may steal your hens, Sir, a whore your health and pence, Sir, your daughter rob your chest, Sir, your wife may steal your rest, Sir, a thief your goods and plate. But this is all but picking, with rest, pence, chest and chicken; it ever was decreed, Sir, if lawyer's hand is feed, Sir, he steals your whole estate.

— John Gay

The laws of probability, so true in general, so fallacious in particular.

— Edward Gibbon

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

— William E. Gladstone

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

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

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.

— Emma Goldman

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

— Oliver Goldsmith

Law grinds the poor, and rich men rule the law.

— Oliver Goldsmith

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.

— Nadine Gordimer

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

— Ulysses S. Grant

Christianity is part of the Common Law of England.

— Matthew Hale

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

— Edward F. Halifax

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.

— Vaclav Havel

Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Charles Evans Hughes

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.

— Hubert H. Humphrey

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

— Washington Irving

Rulers were made to be broken.

— Michael Isenberg

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.

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

Laws teach us to know when we commit injury and when we suffer it.

— Johnson

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

— Samuel Johnson

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.

— Samuel Johnson

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

— Franklin P. Jones

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

— Sir William Jones

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

— John Keats

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

— Robert F. Kennedy

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

It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.

— King Jr. Martin Luther

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

— Jean De La Bruyere

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

— Jean De La Bruyere

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

— Suzanne Lafollette

Lawyers I suppose were children once.

— Charles Lamb

He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides.

— Charles Lamb

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

— Gerald F. Lieberman

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

— Abraham Lincoln

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.

— Abraham Lincoln

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.

— Walter Lippmann

Laws are the sovereigns of sovereigns.

— Louis XIV

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.

— Charles Macklin