“Lawyers I suppose were children once.”
“Every law is an infraction of liberty.”
“Laws, like houses, lean on one another.”
“He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides.”
“Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.”
“If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers.”
“When men are pure, laws are useless; when men are corrupt, laws are broken.”
“An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so.”
“To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.”
“Lawyers are like rhinoceroses: thick skinned, short-sighted, and always ready to charge.”
“The decisions of law courts should never be printed: in the long run, they form a counter authority to the law.”
“A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect.”
“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.”
“The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science, that smiles in yer face while it picks yer pocket: and the glorious uncertainty of it is of more use to the professors than the justice of it.”
“Lawyers enjoy a little mystery, you know. Why, if everybody came forward and told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth straight out, we should all retire to the workhouse.”
“People crushed by law, have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws; and those who have much to hope and nothing to lose, will always be dangerous.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.”
“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.”
“I say, break the law.”
“Law is a bottomless pit.”
“Rulers were made to be broken.”
“Petty laws breed great crimes.”
“The trouble with law is lawyers.”
“Law, without force, is impotent.”
“A good lawyer is a bad neighbor.”
“Where the law ends tyranny begins.”
“The law is reason, free from passion.”
“Laws are the sovereigns of sovereigns.”