Lawyers - Quotes

A countryman between two Lawyers, is like a fish between two cats. - Benjamin Franklin

A lawyer and a cart wheel must be greased. - John R. Beard

A lawyer is an odd sort of fish, first rotten, then green, then ripe. - Robert Christy

Anyone who believes a better day dawns when lawyers are eliminated has the burden of explaining who will take their place. Who will protect the poor, the injured, the victims of negligence, the victims of racial discrimination, and the victims of racial violence?... Lawyers are the simple yet essential means by which people seek to vindicate their rights and we must not foreclose that means. - John Curtin

As a peacemaker, the lawyer has a superior opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough. Never stir up litigation. A worse man can scarcely be found than one who does this. - Abraham Lincoln

As to the essentials of a good lawyer, I have some very definite convictions. He should have a keen sense of right and wrong and a firm belief in basic moral values. I would hate to trust the welfare or protection of the life or property of any of my clients to a lawyer who had no respect for moral values, or one who had a callous indifference as to what was basically right and wrong. - Joseph T. Karcher

At the most pragmatic level, lawyers are society's professional problem solvers. Lawyers are called upon to make distinctions, to explain how and why cases or experiences are alike or different. Lawyers are expected to restore equilibrium, to be balancers. Every discipline, every profession, every job, and every calling has a cutting edge. At that cutting edge, lines are drawn. Lawyers and judges are society's ultimate line drawers. On one side of the line, the conduct, action, or inaction is proper; on the other side of the line, it is not. - Rennard Strickland & Frank T. Read

Beware of lawyers and consultants and people who do not take risks and who do not get their hands dirty. - Felix G. Rohatyn

Good trial lawyers are like writers with heavily plotted stories and sharply defined characters. They lay out each detail precisely to create an illusion of seamless inevitability, leaving no room for doubt, not possibility for an alternate ending. - Elyssa East

He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides. - Charles Lamb

He who will always be his own lawyer will often have a fool for a client. - J. Hunter

I realized the true function of a lawyer was to unite parties riven asunder. The lesson was so indelibly burnt into me that a large part of my time during the twenty years of my practice as a lawyer was occupied in bringing about private compromises of hundreds of cases. I lost nothing thereby – not even money, certainly not my soul. - Mahatma Gandhi

If lawyers were to undertake no causes till they were sure they were just, a man might be precluded altogether from a trial of his claim, though, were it judicially examined, it might be found a very just claim. - Samuel Johnson

If there were no bad people there would be no good lawyers. - Charles Dickens

If you cannot avoid a quarrel with a blackguard, let your lawyer manage it, rather than yourself. No man sweeps his own chimney, but employs a chimney-sweeper, who has no objection to dirty work, because it is his trade. - Charles Caleb Colton

In tribal times, there were the medicine men. In the Middle Ages, there were the priests. Today, there are the lawyers. For every age, a group of bright boys, learned in their trades and jealous of their learning, who blend technical competence with plain and fancy hocus-pocus to make themselves masters of their fellow men. For every age, a pseudo-intellectual autocracy, guarding the tricks of the trade from the uninitiated, and running, after its own pattern, the civilization of its day. - Fred Rodell

It does seem asinine to tolerate a system under which the lawyers always win, whether heads or tails come up. - Frank Cramer

It is a secret worth knowing, that lawyers rarely go to law. - Moses Crowell

It is in the habits of lawyers that every accusation appears insufficient if they do not exaggerate it even to calumny; it is thus that justice itself loses its sanctity and its respect amongst men. - Lamartine

It is the business of a lawyer to find a hole to creep out of any law that is in his way; and if there is no hole, to make one. - W. Ouseley

Law is an imperfect profession in which success can rarely be achieved without some sacrifice of principle. Thus, all practicing lawyers – and most others in the profession – will necessarily be imperfect, especially in the eyes of young idealists. There is no perfect justice, just as there is no absolute in ethics. But there is perfect injustice, and we know it when we see it. - Alan Dershowitz

Lawyer even sounds like liar. - Walter Mosley

Lawyers are a bad lot.... They cheat their living out of honest people. - Albert R. Carman

Lawyers are doubters, skeptics; not in a bad sense. But they never know anything absolutely and utterly without qualifications or modifications. - G. N. Tillman

Lawyers are ideological enemies of informal justice. - Richard L Abel

Lawyers are like catfish. A nibble here, a nibble there ... before you know it the principal's gone, you've got a pile of bills, and not much else. - Meredith Blevins

Lawyers are like cheeses. There are lots of good ones, but not everybody likes the taste of some or can afford the best of others. - Robin Ellison

Lawyers are like doctors. They've each a secret language of their own so that if you get a letter from one lawyer you've got to take it to another to get it read, just like a doctor sends you to a chemist with a rigmarole that no one else can read, so they can charge you what they like for a drop of coloured water. - Harold Brighhouse

Lawyers are like foxes, small and innocuous, but all the time stealthily sniffing the air. - Michael O’Sullivan

Lawyers are like nuclear weapons. By all rights they shouldn't exist, but if some people have them, then you'd better have one, too, just in case. - John Gierach

Lawyers are like painters – once they get into a house, you never know when you will get rid of them again. - Peter Anderson Graham

Lawyers are like priests; people come to them and disburden themselves of their troubles, and get consolation, if they pay well for it; but there is one point in which they don't treat them like priests; they don't confess all their sins; they suppress them, and often get themselves and their counsel into a scrape by it, that's a fact. - Thomas Chandler Haliburton

Lawyers are like professional wrestlers. They pretend to get mad and fight, but then they socialize after a trial is over. - Robert Whitlow

Lawyers are like rabbits. They have a nasty habit of multiplying. - Leo Reilly

Lawyers are like scissors; they never cut each other, but what is between them. - Unknown

Lawyers are like spiders, they've eat up all the flies, and I guess they'll have to eat each other soon. - Thomas Chandler Haliburton

Lawyers are like the knights of old. You can use them to plunder other people's stuff. - Gene Gordon

Lawyers are like unrequited lovers – you give them an inch, and they go for the whole nine yards; you take off one shoe, and they pull down your pants. - Andres Rueda

Lawyers are like wine – you can pay a lot of money for a fancy bottle that tastes like vinegar, or you can find a good deal that fits your budget and your palate alike. - Karen A. Covy

Lawyers are men who hire out their words and anger. - Robert Christy

Lawyers are men who will swear black is white – if they are paid for it. - Edward Counsel

Lawyers are natural politicians. - Clarence Darrow

Lawyers are operators of toll bridges which anyone in search of justice must pass. - Jane Bryant Quinn

Lawyers are perceived by some to matriculate in a realm, if not of their own making, then at least of their own maintenance, in which the secrets of power over the political and legal machinery are reserved, protected, and ultimately manipulated for their own advantage and to the detriment and divestment of others. - Walter Bennett

Lawyers are seldom loved but often needed. - Robert B. McKay

Lawyers are shy of meddling with the Law on their own account: knowing it to be an edged tool of uncertain application, very expensive in the working, and rather remarkable for its properties of close shaving than for its always shaving the right person. - Charles Dickens

Lawyers are the jackals of commerce. - Elbert Hubbard

Lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law is not punished. - Jeremy Bentham

Lawyers generally know too much of law to have a very clear perception of justice. - Eliza Cook

Lawyers get you out'n the kind of trouble you'd never get in if there were no lawyers. - Ken Alstad

Lawyers have a way of seeing that sets them apart from the rest of us. In some way, this special vision makes them invaluable, and in other ways, repulsive. Lawyers are much more focused on rational, logical, and objective criteria to the exclusion of the emotional, subjective, and sometimes irrational responses to the world. Moreover, lawyers like to show no emotion, and possess a particular disdain for the emotions that are found in others, which has the quality of making them seem inhuman. - Thane Rosenbaum

Lawyers must pry into the recesses of the human heart, and become well acquainted with the whole moral world, that they may discover the abstract reason of all laws. - Lord Bolingbroke

Lawyers were notorious for finding cases in the most unlikely places, especially ones with huge potential damagers awards. - Jodi Picoult

Lawyers will always buckle under to something, whether its bribes, violence, court orders, or the weight of their own bullshit. - James Alan Gardner

Most of the dishonest lawyers are the product of dishonest clients – the demand creates the supply. - Morris Salem

Most people ask questions because they want to know the answer; lawyers are trained never to ask questions unless they already know the answer. - Lani Guinier

Never enter into an argument with a lawyer, for, of necessity, it is time lost; not that lawyers are fools – far from it – but that their intellects are concentrated in the endeavour to make sophistries pass for truths. - Charles William Day

Now we got a lawyer, we got civilization, which I understand to mean that a man has a chance to get rich without working. - Sinclair Lewis

Ours is a culture dominated by experts, experts who profess to assist the rest of us, but who often instead make us their victim. Among those experts whom we are often victimized the most notable are perhaps the lawyers. If you as a plain person take yourself to be wronged and you wish to achieve redress, or if you are falsely accused and you wish to avoid unjust punishment, or if you need to negotiate some agreement with others in order to launch some enterprise, you will characteristically find yourself compelled to put yourself into the hands of lawyers – lawyers who will proceed to represent you by words that are often not in fact yours, who will utter in your name documents that it would never have occurred to you to utter, and you will behave ostensibly on your behalf in ways that may well be repugnant to you, so guiding you through processes whose complexity seems to have as a central function to make it impossible for plain persons to do without lawyers. - Alasdair Macintyre

People are getting smarter nowadays; they are letting lawyers, instead of their conscience, be their guide. - Will Rogers

People who use lawyers are not people you would really want to hang around with. - Deborah Ross

Rattle a lawyer's door and you get more lawyers. - C. J. Cherryh

Since lawyers are thinkers and not feelers, and their moral development is locked into the rigidity of maintaining law and order, they often come across as impersonal, insensitive, amoral, and not particularly human to the clients they serve. - Thane Rosenbaum

Some lawyers are like unto the camel, which, before drinking out of a brook, maketh the water turbid with his foot. - Adolphus William Ward

Successful trial lawyers are like heat-seeking missiles carrying payloads of information prejudicial to their opponent's case, constantly looking for the chance to unload their cargo, right up until the final moments of trial. - David Berg

The ablest lawyers are always associated with the biggest fees. - Clarence Darrow

The great trial lawyers are the ones who help their jurors by providing them with the tools with which to reach the right verdict. - G. Christopher Ritter

The lawyer's pouch is a mouth of hell. - Henry George Bohn

The most successful trial lawyers are often master storytellers, making their cases come to life for their jurors. The reason is that stories matter ... stories are the deepest and most obvious way that humans organize, communicate, receive, and digest facts. - G. Christopher Ritter

The office of the lawyer ... is too delicate, personal and confident to be occupied by a corporation. - Robert H. Jackson

The only secret that the lawyer really possesses about the law is that no one can ever be certain of what the law is.... The lawyer is accustomed to the ways of bending and changing rules to suit his (or his client's) purposes, to dance in the shadows of the law's ambiguities. Rules hold no particular terror for the lawyer, just as the sight of blood holds no terror for the surgeon. Because he operates a system of rules, the lawyer becomes indifferent to them in the way that a doctor becomes indifferent to the humanity of the body that is lying on the operating table. - Jethro Lieberman

The question arises ... whether all lawyers are the same. This is like asking whether everything that gets into a sewer is garbage. - Florynce R. Kennedy

There is a vague popular belief that lawyers are necessarily dishonest. I say vague, because when we consider to what extent confidence and honors are reposed in and conferred upon lawyers by the people, it appears improbable that their impression of dishonesty is very distinct and vivid. Yet the impression is common, almost universal. Let no young man choosing the law for a calling for a moment yield to the popular belief. Resolve to be honest at all events; and if in your own judgment you cannot be an honest lawyer, resolve to be honest without being a lawyer. Choose some other occupation, rather than one in the choosing of which you do, in advance, consent to be a knave. - Abraham Lincol

We don't operate a system that guarantees a trial lawyer will really know what he or she is doing before handling a trial. Qualify as an attorney and you immediately have the right to screw up somebody's case in court. We lawyers have been left with a huge field in which to demonstrate our incompetence. - Keith Evans

We lawyers are always curious, always inquisitive, always picking up odds and ends for our patchwork minds, since there is no knowing when and where they may fit into some corner. - Charles Dickens

When the monetary damages are smaller, lawyers will find themselves less zealous in their pursuit of what they call justice. - Dean O’Hara

Where there's a will, there's a lawyer. - Robert Elliott

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