Law Quotes

A successful lawsuit is the one worn by a policeman.

Robert Frost

The Roman Republic fell, not because of the ambition of Caesar or Augustus, but because it had already long ceased to be in any real sense a republic at all. When the sturdy Roman plebeian, who lived by his own labor, who voted without reward according to his own convictions, and who with his fellows formed in war the terrible Roman legion, had been changed into an idle creature who craved nothing in life save the gratification of a thirst for vapid excitement, who was fed by the state, and who directly or indirectly sold his vote to the highest bidder, then the end of the republic was at hand, and nothing could save it. The laws were the same as they had been, but the people behind the laws had changed, and so the laws counted for nothing.

Theodore Roosevelt

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

Proverb

Some things are easier to legalize than to legitimate.

Sebastian Roch Nicolas Chamfort

The burden therefore rests with the American legal community and with the American human-rights lobbies and non-governmental organizations. They can either persist in averting their gaze from the egregious impunity enjoyed by a notorious war criminal and lawbreaker, or they can become seized by the exalted standards to which they continually hold everyone else. The current state of suspended animation, however, cannot last. If the courts and lawyers of this country will not do their duty, we shall watch as the victims and survivors of this man pursue justice and vindication in their own dignified and painstaking way, and at their own expense, and we shall be put to shame.

Christopher Hitchens

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

Thus, dear friends, I have said it clearly enough, and I believe you ought to understand it and not make liberty a law...

Martin Luther King Jr.

Law is a bottomless pit.

John Arbuthnot

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

Henry Ward Beecher

The wheel of the Good Law moves swiftly on. It grinds by night and day. The worthless husks it drives from out the golden grain, the refuse from the flour. The hand of fate guides the wheel; the revolutions mark the beatings of the heart of manifestation.

Helen P. Blavatsky, The Voice of

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

James Clerk Maxwell

Whenever you wish to do anything against the law, Cicely, always consult a good solicitor first.

George Bernard Shaw

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

Johann von Goethe

If you want good laws, burn those you have and make new ones.

Voltaire

A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.

Herbert Spencer

Petty laws breed great crimes.

Ouida

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.

Virginia Ostman

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

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

The minute you read something that you can't understand, you can almost be sure that it was drawn up by a lawyer.

Will Rogers