Quotations and Poems

» “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 leaned 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

»  ”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

»  ”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

»  ”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 kind of lawyer you hope the other fellow has.”
– Raymond Chandler

»  ”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 good of the people is the greatest law.”
– Marcus T. Cicero

»  ”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

»  ”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

»  ”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

»  ”The laws of each are convertible into the laws of any other.”
– 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

»  ”Good men must not obey the laws too well.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

»  ”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 fee d, 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

»  ”Law grinds the poor, and rich men rule the law.”
– Oliver Goldsmith

»  ”The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.”
– Oliver Goldsmith

»  ”In a democracy — even if it is a so-called democracy like our white-