LAWYER QUOTES
“I
think we may class the lawyer in the natural history of
monsters.”
John Keats: Letter to George and Georgiana Keats,
March 13, 1819
“I
would be loth to speak ill of any person who I do not
know deserves it, but I am afraid he is an attorney.”
Samuel Johnston: Mrs Piozzi’s Anecdotes, 1786
“The
first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
Shakespeare: II Henry VI, iv, c. 1591
“He
saw a lawyer killing a viper
On a dunghill hard by his own stable,
And the Devil smiled, for it put him in mind,
Of Cain and his brother Abel.”
S. T. Coleridge: The Devil’s Thoughts, 1799
“He
that goes to law holds a wolf by the ear.”
Robert Burton: The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621
“Lawyers
use the law as shoemakers use leather: rubbing it, pressing
it, and stretching it with their teeth, all to the end
of making it fit their purpose.”
Louis XII of France (1462-1515)
“God
has not given laws to make out of right wrong, and out
of wrong right, as the un-Christianlike lawyers do, who
study the law only for gain and profit.”
Martin Luther: Table-Talk, DCCCXXX, 1569
“It
would be better to have no laws at all than to have as
many as we have.”
Michel De Montaigne: Essays, III, 1588
“Yes,
Jamie, he was a bad man, but he might have been worse:
he was an Irishman, but he might have been a Scotchman;
he was a priest, but he might have been a lawyer.”
Samuel Parr: Said of James O’Coighy, hanged
for treason on June 7, 1798
“Law
is but a heathen word for power.”
Daniel Defoe: The History of the Kentish Petition,
1701
“God
save us from a Lawyer’s etcetera.”
French Proverb
“A
lawyer is always more ready to get a man into troubles
than out of them.”
Oliver Goldsmith: The Good Natur’d Man, III,
1768
“Unnecessary
laws are not good laws, but traps for money.”
Author unidentified
“The
Devil makes his Christmas pie of lawyers’ tongues.”
English Proverb, traced to the XVI century
“Every
law which originated in ignorance and malice, and gratifies
the passions from which it sprang, we call the wisdom
of our ancestors.”
Sydney Smith: Peter Plymley’s Letters, I, 1807
“The
lawyers are accounted knaves all over the land.”
Anon.: The Countryman’s Care, 1641
“A
man without money needs no more fear a crowd of lawyers
than a crowd of pickpockets.”
William Wycherley: The Plain Dealer, III, c. 1674
“Laws
are best explained, interpreted and applied by those whose
interests and abilities lie in perverting, confounding
and eluding them.”
Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels, II, 1736
“Young
lawyers attend the courts, not because they have business
there but because they have no business anywhere else.”
Washington Irving: Salmagundi, June 27, 1807
“Who
calls a lawyer rogue, may find too late, On one of these
depends, his whole estate.”
George Crabbe: Tales, II (The Gentleman Farmer), 1812
“Law
only binds when they are in accordance with right reason,
and hence with the eternal law of God.”
Pope Leo XIII: Rerum novarum, May 15, 1891
‡‡
“Laws are made for men of ordinary understanding,
and should therefore be construed by the ordinary rules
of common sense. Their meaning is not to be sought for
in metaphysical subtleties, which may make anything mean
everything or nothing, at pleasure.”‡‡
Thomas Jefferson: Letter to William Johnson, 1823
“A
bad agreement is better than a good lawyer.”
Italian Proverb
“The
passing of an unjust law is the suicide of authority.”
Pastoral letter of the American Roman Catholic Hierarchy,
Feb., 1920
“The
better the lawyer, the worse the Christian.”
Dutch Proverb
“The
more law, the less justice (Summum jus, summa injuria)
Author unidentified
“God
works wonders now and then:
Behold a lawyer, an honest man.”
Benjamin Franklin: Poor Richard’s Almanac, 1733
- Quotes about lawyers by famous people -
“Extremity
of law is extremity of wrong.”
John Clarke: Paroemiologia Anglo-Latina, 1639
“Let
all the laws be clear, uniform and precise: to interpret
laws is almost always to corrupt them.”
Voltaire: Philosophical Dictionary, 1764
“Here
lies John Shaw, Attorney-at-law
And when he died the Devil cried
Give us your paw, John Shaw, Attorney-at-law.”
H. J. Loaring: Epitaphs Quaint, Curious and Elegant,
1872
“It
is better that laws be so constructed as to leave as little
as possible to the decision of those who judge.”
Aristotle: Rhetoric, I, c. 322 B.C.
“Laws
are inherited like diseases.”
J. W. Goethe: I Faust, I, 1808
“A
peasant between two lawyers is like a fish between two
cats.”
Spanish Proverb
“A
man may as well open an oyster without a knife as a lawyer’s
mouth without a fee.”
Barten Holyday: Technogamia, 1618
“Laws
are like medicines: they usually cure the disease only
by setting up another that is lesser or more transient.”
Otto Von Bismarck: Speech in the Prussian Upper House,
March 6, 1872
“When
two dogs fight for a bone and the third runs off with
it, there’s a lawyer among the dogs.”
German Proverb
“By
length of time and continuance laws are so multiplied
and grown to that excessive variety that there is a necessity
of a reduction of them, otherwise it is not manageable.”
Matthew Hale: History of the Pleas of the Crown, 1736
“The
fell attorney prowls for prey.”
Samuel Johnston: London, 1738
“The
law is a sort of hocus-pocus science that smiles in your
face as it picks your pocket.”
Charles Macklin: Love à la Mode, II, 1759 (Cf.
Howell, ante, 1621)
“Love
all men, but not lawyers.”
Irish Proverb
“Laws
always lose in energy what the government gains in extent.”
Immanuel Kant: Perpetual Peace, Supplement, I, 1795
“The
animals are not so stupid: they have no lawyers.”
Author unidentified
“Virtue
in the middle, said the Devil, as he sat between two lawyers.”
Danish Proverb
“Sometimes
a man who deserves to be looked down upon because he is
a fool, is despised only because he is a lawyer.”
C. L. De Montesquieu: Persian Letters, XLIV, 1721
“No
lawyer will ever go to Heaven so long as there is room
for more in Hell.”
Author unidentified
“New
Laws are too apt to be voluminous, and so perplexed and
mutable, from whence proceeds neglect, contempt and ignorance.”
William Warburton (Bishop of Gloucester): The Causes
of Prodigies and Miracles, I, 1727
"A lawyer
with a briefcase can steal more money than 100 men with
guns."
Mario Puzo: The Godfather.
“Laws
are now maintained in credit, not because they are essentially
just, but because they are laws. It is the mystical foundation
of their authority; they have none other. They are often
made by fools; more often by men who in hatred of equality
have want of equity; but ever by men who are vain and
irresolute. There is nothing so grossly and largely offending,
nor so ordinarily wrongful, as the laws.”
Author unidentified
“The
lawyers rejected the counsel of God.”
Luke VII, 30, c. 75
“The
law is not the same at morning and at night.”
George Herbert: Jacula Prudentum, 1651
“Lawyers
have been known to wrest from reluctant juries triumphant
verdicts of acquittal for their clients, even when those
clients, as often happens, were clearly and unmistakably
innocent.”
Oscar Wilde: The Decay of Lying, 1889
“Lawyers
and soldiers are the Devil’s playmates.”
Author unidentified
“The
only man [a lawyer] in whom ignorance of the law is not
punished.”
Elbert Hubbard: Roycroft Dictionary and Book of Epigrams,
1923
“Fools
and stubborn men make lawyers wealthy.”
Spanish Proverb
