Lawyer Quotes

And he said, Woe unto you also, ye lawyers! for ye lade men with burdens grievous to be borne, and ye yourselves touch not the burdens with one of your fingers.

Deal with just the basic fact: we will never have enough money for lawyers for poor people. So one of our major initiatives has been to develop new technologies that can help people without a lawyer navigate the legal system, and help sort the cases that really need to have a lawyer from those where an individual with some help online, may be able to manage by him or herself.

The reality is that most celebrity defendants are extremely unknowledgeable, naive and vulnerable, and if they get into trouble they usually call their lawyer friends who handle criminal cases. And if they do not know any, they call their business lawyers, who then refer them to lawyer friends of theirs who handle criminal cases. It's very incestuous.

Most of the prosecutors I know are good people who are committed to protecting us from those who would prey on us. But these days, I sometimes run into prosecutors who just don't seem to have the character we used to have 20-30 years ago. People need to understand that prosecutors are lawyers, and like my grandmama once told me, a law degree is a license to lie.

If you want to get ahead in this world get a lawyer -- not a book.

Lawyers are fleas on the hide of human nature.

Exactly who is this God character who is said to be all-powerful yet needs to hire lawyers to take us to court? Isn't he miffed when someone he had always considered to be a true follower turns to the legal system rather than to prayer? Why would the faithful risk making God look ridiculous by losing a trial on Earth when he is certain to win every trial in heaven?

Whatever their failings as a class may be, and however likely to lose their immortal souls, lawyers do not generally lose papers.

There are seven natural openings in the head and body. A lawyer is the only human being with eight. The extra one is a slot to store money in, should his bank be unable to hold all of it.

I await the hour when a journalist can be driven from the press room for venal practices, as a minister can be unfrocked, or a lawyer disbarred.

The only ones who will see an increase in pay are some of the trial lawyers who bring the cases.

A librarian is not a legal process. There is not librarian in the country unless she or he is a lawyer who is in the position to determine what he or she is looking at is indeed child pornography.

If you have a legal problem, guess how you determine whether or not you need a lawyer. You see a lawyer. Isn't that weird?

A man cannot govern a nation if he cannot govern a city; he cannot govern a city if he cannot govern a family; he cannot govern a family unless he can govern himself; and he cannot govern himself unless his passions are subject to reason

I happen to like debating, and I like to debate like a lawyer, and I can argue any points to death, and I will.

A Seattle lawyer once interrupted his lengthy cross-examination of a witness and exclaimed, "Your Honor, one of the jurors is asleep." "You put him to sleep," replied the judge. "Suppose you wake him up."

Lawyers, before any other group, must continue to point out how the system is really working-how it actually affects real people. They must constantly demonstrate to courts and legislatures alike the tragic results of legal nonintervention. They must highlight how legal doctrines no longer bear any relation to reality, whether in landlord and tenant law, holder in due course law, or any other law. In sum, lawyers must bring real morality into the legal consciousness

The business of the law is to make sense of the confusion of what we call human life - to reduce it to order but at the same time to give it possibility, scope, even dignity.

We must delight in each other, make others conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body.

We have the heaviest concentration of lawyers on Earth -- one for every five-hundred Americans; three times as many as are in England, four times as many as are in West Germany, twenty-one times as many as there are in Japan. We have more litigation, but I am not sure that we have more justice. No resources of talent and training in our own society, even including the medical care, is more wastefully or unfairly distributed than legal skills. Ninety percent of our lawyers serve 10 percent of our people. We are over-lawyered and under-represented.

As a society we're always so quick and able to spend money on lawyers for someone for incarceration, but we don't make the corresponding commitment to the preventative components of it.

I think being called a she-devil by a trial lawyer is meant as a compliment.

You just got to be really logical when you're a comedian - to a fault. Like a lawyer's got to believe in the law.

Your lawyer is your true mercenary. Under his code honor consists in making the best possible fight in exchange for the biggest possible fee. He is frankly for sale to the highest bidder.

Everybody should read fiction… I don’t think serious fiction is written for a few people. I think we live in a stupid culture that won’t educate its people to read these things. It would be a much more interesting place if it would. And it’s not just that mechanics and plumbers don’t read literary fiction, it’s that doctors and lawyers don’t read literary fiction. It has nothing to do with class, it has to do with an anti-intellectual culture that doesn’t trust art.

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.

Simplicity is hard to build, easy to use, and hard to charge for. Complexity is easy to build, hard to use, and easy to charge for.

I heard from my cat's lawyer today; my cat wants $12,000 a week for Tender Vittles.

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.

Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to same-sex couples.

I did not intend to be a writer. I first wanted to be a lawyer, like my father. Then I got bit by the bug of philosophy and wanted to be a philosophy professor. I went to graduate school and quickly discovered it was impossible for a woman in those days - this was the early fifties - to be a philosopher, so I gave that up.

If laws were real they wouldn’t need to be enforced, because if they were real they couldn’t be broken. Try breaking the law of gravity. Now that’s a law. Laws made by man are rules reflecting the current status of his moral codes. As he alters and whittles away his morality, casting bits and pieces aside, his codes change to reflect it.

I'm real bent on dialogue. I'm just a little bit crazy and when you put that along with 20 years as a criminal lawyer, it's pretty easy to come up with some interesting plots.

Embracing failure is the most important trait I've developed in my career. I have tried to learn from my failures, and I believe it has made me stronger, more confident and more resilient.

I've never wanted to be a doctor, I've never wanted to be an engineer, I've never had that goal, but when you're around people who are successful, you kind of feel some type of way like, I don't want to be a doctor or lawyer but I do want to be successful.

Every lawyer of experience comes to know (more or less unconsciously) that in the great majority of cases, the precedents are none too good as bases of prediction. Somehow or other, there are plenty of precedents to go around.

Lawsuits generally originate with the obstinate and the ignorant, but they do not end with them; and that lawyer was right who left all his money to the support of an asylum for fools and lunatics, saying that from such he got it, and to such he would bequeath it.

Whoa. He had ghouls on speed dial. My lawyer kicks so much ass.

A great many college graduates come here thinking of lawyers as social engineers arguing the great Constitutional issues.

I would proclaim that the vast majority of what [say, Scientific American] is true-yet my ability to defend such a claim is weaker than I would like. And most likely the readers, authors, and editors of that magazine would be equally hard pressed to come up with cogent, non-technical arguments convincing a skeptic of this point, especially if pitted against a clever lawyer arguing the contrary. How come Truth is such a slippery beast?

The nature of men and of organized society dictates the maintenance in every field of action of the highest and purest standards of justice and of right dealing.... By justice the lawyer generally means the prompt, fair, and open application of impartial rules; but we call ours a Christian civilization, and a Christian conception of justice must be much higher. It must include sympathy and helpfulness and a willingness to forego self-interest in order to promote the welfare, happiness, and contentment of others and of the community as a whole.

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.

I was a lawyer for about ten years. The law teaches one to see things from all different angles.

A house divided against itself cannot stand.

There must be some point, at which the lawyer's own personal and social morality will rebel against his traditional allegiance to his client.

After a long investigation the SEC has fined Halliburton $7.5 million for issuing fraudulent statements exaggerating their profits in 1998 and 1999 during which their CEO was - oh who was it? Oh that's right. ... Cheney himself has not been implicated in the scandal and according to Cheney's lawyer there is no allegation whatsoever that he acted in any way other than in the best interests of the company and its shareholders. And you know what? It's still true today.

Alas! the small discredit of a bribe Scarce hurts the lawyer, but undoes the scribe.

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

As to the Christian religion, besides the strong evidence which we have for it, there is a balance in its favor from the number of great men who have been convinced of its truth after a serious consideration of the question. Grotius was an acute man, a lawyer, a man accustomed to examine evidence, and he was convinced. Grotius was not a recluse, but a man of the world, who certainly had no bias on the side of religion. Sir Isaac Newton set out an infidel, and came to be a very firm believer.

It would be as wise to set up an accomplished lawyer to saw wood as a business as to condemn an educated and sensible woman to spend all her time boiling potatoes and patching old garments. Yet this is the lot of many a one who incessantly stitches and boils and bakes, compelled to thrust back out of sight the aspirations which fill her soul.