“To succeed in the other trades, capacity must be shown; in the law, concealment of it will do.”
“A jury too often has at least one member more ready to hang the panel than to hang the traitor.”
“Whenever you wish to do anything against the law, Cicely, always consult a good solicitor first.”
“A lawyer is a gentlemen that rescues your estate from your enemies and then keeps it to himself.”
“Laws and institutions, like clocks, must occasionally be cleaned, wound up, and set to true time.”
“Who thinks the law has anything to do with justice? It's what we have because we can't have justice.”
“I know of no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their strict execution.”
“Young lawyers attend the courts, not because they have business there, but because they have no business.”
“Courts of law, and all the paraphernalia and folly of law cannot be found in a rational state of society.”
“Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty.”
“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.”
“Going to trial with a lawyer who considers your whole life-style a Crime in Progress is not a happy prospect.”
“Under any conditions, anywhere, whatever you are doing, there is some ordinance under which you can be booked.”
“The due process of law as we use it, I believe, rests squarely on the liberal idea of conflict and resolution.”
“An incompetent attorney can delay a trial for years or months. A competent attorney can delay one even longer.”
“The decisions of law courts should never be printed: in the long run, they form a counter authority to the law.”
“Avoid lawsuits beyond all things; they pervert your conscience, impair your health, and dissipate your property.”
“Whenever men take the law into their own hands, the loser is the law. And when the law loses, freedom languishes.”
“In cross examination, as in fishing, nothing is more ungainly than a fisherman pulled into the water by his catch.”
“It is difficult to make our material condition better by the best law, but it is easy enough to ruin it by bad laws.”
“Law school taught me one thing; how to take two situations that are exactly the same and show how they are different.”
“All that makes existence valuable to any one depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people.”
“There is no nation so powerful, as the one that obeys its laws not from principals of fear or reason, but from passion.”
“The only laws of matter are those that our minds must fabricate and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter.”
“Scarcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved, sooner or later, into a judicial question.”
“Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.”
“I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis on the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.”
“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.”
“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.”
“A lawyers dream of heaven; every man reclaimed his property at the resurrection, and each tried to recover it from all his forefathers.”