Quotes & Sayings About Lawyers

It was evident however that the lawyers would have to have their say ... This also opened up a vista both lengthy and obscure. — Winston Churchill

I am quite content to come home and go to Farming, be a select Man, and owe no Man any Thing but good Will. There I can get a little health and teach my Boys to be Lawyers. — John Adams

In one respect at least the Martians are a happy people, they have no lawyers. — Edgar Rice Burroughs

The truth was, the more he got portrayed as an unprincipled, ruthless prick, the more clients flocked to him. Because when it came to divorce, people wanted a ruthless prick. They lined up for one. — Michael Crichton

If you go to the city of Washington, you will find that almost all of those corporation lawyers and cowardly politicians, members of congress, and mis-representatives of the masses claim, in glowing terms, that they have risen from the ranks to places of eminence and distinction. I am very glad that I cannot make that claim for myself. I would be ashamed to admit that I had risen from the ranks. When I rise it will be with the ranks, and not from the ranks. — Eugene V. Debs

In the world of intellectual property, armies of lawyers (often employed by non-practicing entities, as I mentioned in chapter 6) do battle to seize the property of others - usually small businesses that are relatively defenseless. — Sam Wilkin

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers. — Camille Paglia

Shakespeare said, "Kill all the lawyers." There were no agents then. — Robin Williams

Lawyers and rogues are vermin not easily rooted out of a rich soil. — Horace Walpole

He did what good lawyers always do. He shifted his argument in the direction his audience was already going. — Jeffrey Toobin

Heaven knows insanity was disreputable enough, long ago; but now that the lawyers have got to cutting every gallows rope and picking every prison lock with it, it is become a sneaking villainy that ought to hang and keep on hanging its sudden possessors until evil-doers should conclude that the safest plan was to never claim to have it until they came by it legitimately. The very calibre of the people the lawyers most frequently try to save by the insanity subterfuge ought to laugh the plea out of the courts, one would think. — Mark Twain

Her parents were going to a conference for the weekend. The conference was called "Lawyers are Lovely, Great and Superb: so Why Does Everyone Think that They are Liars, Greedy and Scum?" and Mr Thomson was doing a speech called "Ten Tips to Make Lawyers as Popular as Doctors. — Jaclyn Moriarty

So many people imagine housekeeping to be boring, frustrating, repetitive, unintelligent drudgery. I cannot agree. In fact, having kept house, practiced law, taught, and done many other sorts of work, low and high-paid, I can assure you that it is actually lawyers who are most familiar with the experience of unintelligent drudgery. — Cheryl Mendelson

Modern business-people and lawyers are, in fact, powerful sorcerers. The principal difference between them and tribal shamans is that modern lawyers tell far stranger tales. — Yuval Noah Harari

The negative principle that no law is free law, is not much known except among lawyers. — Abraham Lincoln

In court, pricey lawyers from the city try to answer the question: whose life is more endangered, the spotted owl's or the logger's? Victims of mutual incompatibility, both owl and logger are disappearing in Oregon, a state that once had enough standing timber to rebuild every house in America. — Timothy Egan

I don't have any friends; I just have lawyers. — Mike Oldfield

The coffee arrives, and we backslide into what lawyers do best
talking about other lawyers. — John Grisham

Great," Leo muttered. "Eidolons who are also lawyers. Now I really want to kill them." "Okay, forget them for now," Hazel said. — Rick Riordan

In 2031, lawyers will be commonly a part of most development teams. — Grady Booch

With great lawyers you have discussed lepers and crooks, you've been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books. — Bob Dylan

I do not apologize for these terms or, more generally, for discussing judicial thinking in a vocabulary alien to most judges and lawyers. Judicial behavior cannot be understood in the vocabulary that judges themselves use, sometimes mischievously. (11) — Richard A. Posner

Lawyers belong to the people by birth and interest, and to the aristocracy by habit and taste; they may be looked upon as the connecting link of the two great classes of society. — Alexis De Tocqueville

I never wanted to be Protestant. Jews do, plenty of them. Not me. To be assimilated, to be respectable, to be detached like the Wasps, I understand the desire, but I knew never to try. I see all those distinguished Wasps with the beautiful gray hair and the pinstripe suits who don't have pimples on their ass. They're my lawyers ... These guys are quiet. I don't want to be that way. I couldn't begin to be that way. I'm the wild Jew of the pampas. I am the Golem of the U.S.A. — Philip Roth

Mostly, though, he made people laugh, with wicked impersonations of everyone around him: clients, lawyers, clerks, even the cleaning woman. When Pickwick Papers came out, his former colleagues realized that half of them had turned up in its pages. His eyes - eyes that everyone who ever met him, to the day he died, remarked on - beautiful, animated, warm, dreamy, flashing, sparkling - though no two people ever agreed on their colour - were they grey, green, blue, brown? - those eyes missed nothing, any more than did his ears. He could imitate anyone. Brimming over with an all but uncontainable energy, which the twenty-first century might suspiciously describe as manic, he discharged his superplus of vitality by incessantly walking the streets, learning London as he went, mastering it, memorizing the names of the roads, the local accents, noting the characteristic topographies of the many villages of which the city still consisted. — Simon Callow

Lawyers can steal more money with a briefcase than a thousand men with guns and masks.
-Don Vito Corleone — Mario Puzo

I told you all lawyers are worthless. After all it takes won (sic) to know one. — Dan Quayle

Americans, too many of them, take themselves too seriously. You're going to get rapped - by the viewers, by the sponsors and by the network brass - if you joke about doctors, lawyers, dentists, scientists, bus drivers, I don't care who. You can't make a joke about Catholics, Negroes, Jews, Italians, politicians, dogs or cats. In fact, politicians, dogs and cats are the most sacred institutions in America. — Johnny Carson

Lawyers are predators in grey worsted. — Tom Holt

It is the lawyers who run our civilization for us
our governments, our business, our private lives. Most legislators are lawyers; they make our laws. Most presidents, governors, commissioners, along with their advisers and brain-trusters are lawyers; they administer our laws. All the judges are lawyers; they interpret and enforce our laws. There is no separation of powers where the lawyers are concerned. There is only a concentration of all government power
in the lawyers. — Fred Rodell

I've got so many lawyers waiting in line to see me, you'd think that tobacco was leaking from my breast implants. — Jimmy James

When cops are on the job they love lawyers like lions love hyenas, only minus the mutual respect. — Reed Farrel Coleman

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

Nowadays ... deals are transactional rather than personal. Instead of placing your faith in a person, you get lawyers to write safeguards into the contract. This is an historic shift from a trust economy to a risk economy. But trust is not a dispensable luxury. It is the very basis of our social life. Many scholars believe that capitalism had religious roots because people could trust other people who, feeling that they were answerable to God, could be relied on to be honest in business. A world without trust is a lonely and dangerous place. — Jonathan Sacks

Most lawyers who win a case advise their clients, "We have won," and when justice has frowned upon their cause ... "You have lost. — Louis Nizer

Why do we place such a disproportionate emphasis on sporting achievement? Why doesn't success in other fields receive similar attention ... Maybe it's because in a country that prides itself on being egalitarian, sport is intellectually and socio-economically an equal playing field. In fact, the more humble your background, the better, the underdog-turned champion is a narrative that resonates powerfully. We're far less interested in the stories of our best doctors, writers, lawyers, engineers, teachers or social workers. Their triumphs do not capture our collective imaginations. — Mia Freedman

I think writers are a lot like lawyers. We feed off the misfortunes of people, even ourselves. — Gail Anderson-Dargatz

A new country seems to follow a pattern. First come the openers, strong and brave and rather childlike. They can take care of themselves in a wilderness, but they are naive and helpless against men, and perhaps that is why they went out in the first place. When the rough edges are worn off the new land, businessmen and lawyers come in to help with the development
to solve problems of ownership, usually by removing the temptations to themselves. And finally comes culture, which is entertainment, relaxation, transport out of the pain of living. And culture can be on any level, and is.
The Church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. — John Steinbeck

Send lawyers, guns, and money. Dad, get me out of this. — Warren Zevon

And many more Destructions played
In this ghastly masquerade,
All disguised, even to the eyes,
Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, and spies.
Last came Anarchy: he rode
On a white horse, splashed with blood;
He was pale even to the lips,
Like Death in the Apocalypse.
And he wore a kingly crown;
And in his grasp a sceptre shone;
On his brow this mark I saw -
I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

I detest so much ... those persons, who insist upon telling you everything - who labor every point, as the lawyers say, as if they thought all excellence consisted in length ... — Mary Russell Mitford

If you have a lawyer, sometimes you can get out of trouble. I've gotten into a lot of trouble because I didn't have a lawyer. I've also had some bad lawyers, too. But the good ones, the ones I liked, they became me. They became whatever situation I was involved in. When I felt pain, so did they. When I succeeded, so did they. They became me. They became whatever the situation was that they became involved with. — Mike Tyson

Yes. But the Brahmins don't just cure people. They are also teachers, lawyers, priests, basically any intellectual profession.' 'Talented people,' sniffed Shiva. — Amish Tripathi

I've seen lawyers who don't represent me and spokespeople who do not know me speaking for me. These characters always seem to surface with dreadful allegations just as another project, an album, a video is being released. — Michael Jackson

Visible alternatives shatter the sense of inevitability, that the system must, necessarily, be patched together in the same form
this is why it became such an imperative of global governance to stamp them out, or, when that's not possible, to ensure that no one knows about them. To become aware of it allows us to see everything we are already doing in a new light. To realize we're all already communists when working on a common projects, all already anarchists when we solve problems without recourse to lawyers or police, all revolutionaries when we make something genuinely new. — David Graeber

You know, if you monitored the humidity a little better in here, you might reduce the irritants.'
'I assume you're referring to the mites, and not the lawyers. — Jodi Picoult

America is a country where the Olympics and the divorce lawyers both have the same slogan - Go for the Gold. — Bob Hope

The cultivation - even celebration - of victimhood by intellectuals, tort lawyers, politicians and the media is both cause and effect of today's culture of complaint. — George Will

"Lawyers Are": Those whose interests and abilities lie in perverting, confounding and eluding the law. — Jonathan Swift

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

Freud pointed out, in his Problem of Lay Analysis , that it is extremely unlikely that a young man who would throw the best years of his life into the cloistered drudgery of getting an M.D. degree, could possibly make a good psychoanalyst; so he preferred to look for young analysts among the writers, the lawyers, the mothers of families, those who had chosen human contact. But in their economic wisdom, the Psychoanalytic Institute of Vienna (and New York) overruled him. — Paul Goodman

We're in an era where the demand is for immediate hits that are destined to become obsolescent. Six months later, everyone forgets the artist and the tune. It's become like a con job. Producers, engineers, lawyers and accountants all make money, but the artists don't. — Tony Bennett

As workers in Alaska built 800 miles of pipeline through wilderness all but uninhabited by humans, workers in Washington took up the challenge of pushing 100 miles of rapid transit through a long-settled region densely populated by lawyers. — Zachary M. Schrag

Patent lawyers had only lately ascended to the aristocracy of the American bar. Trained not just as lawyers but as scientists or engineers, and working in small, specialized firms, they were at one time rudely dismissed by corporate lawyers as gearheads in green eyeshades, not good enough at science to be scientists, nor sufficiently talented at law to be real lawyers. Then came the intellectual property revolution of the 1990s, and these onetime outcasts found themselves ruling the last vibrant corner of the American economy. — Paul Goldstein

There has to be some limit to what lawyers can take from their clients. Otherwise, cagey attorneys end up with the lion's share of the settlement and the victims end up with little more than scraps. — Dennis Hastert

To have the external pressure of a job removed is very astonishing. Your own will is now your only motor and it has no horse-power. Sometimes I think that perhaps the most competent business men, and lawyers and doctors, who must be at the office at nine o'clock every morning, do not realize this and take more credit for initiative and industry than they deserve. And it is why all the bright women of the world, who if more were expected of them, might do important work, but who instead have a chronic feeling of ineffectiveness and sloth. — Brenda Ueland

When I first started out, I was trying to write stories about nurses and lawyers and a lot of people I didn't know anything about, and they just weren't working. — Donald Ray Pollock

[Barack] Obama's executive amnesty has been frozen via a stay by a judge on the appellate court. You remember, this is the judge that discovered the Defense Department lawyers were lying to him in open court, and instead of actually sanctioning them, he demanded that they go to a new ethics course to learn the proper behavior and decorum and the law in court, that you just can't lie with impunity to a judge. — Rush Limbaugh

The public regards lawyers with great distrust. They think lawyers are smarter than the average guy but use their intelligence deviously. Well, they're wrong. Usually they are not smarter. — F. Lee Bailey

An individual who delights at all in the beauty of language does well to avoid becoming an attorney or a legislator. — Ron Brackin

We have taken God out of our education system. We have taken Him out of government. You have lawyers that sue you every time you mention the name of Jesus Christ in any public forum. — Franklin Graham

Lawyers often face intense demands but have relatively little "decision latitude." Behavioral scientists use this term to describe the choices, and perceived choices, a person has. In a sense, it's another way of describing autonomy - and lawyers are glum and cranky because they don't have much of it. — Daniel H. Pink

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 don't know any, they call their business lawyers, who then refer them to lawyer friends of theirs. — Vincent Bugliosi

I actually kind of like Janet Reno. She seems like a nice enough lady. But when you're basically going through the entire phone book trying to find women lawyers who don't have maids to pick the attorney general of the United States, how well can you do? — Dave Barry

To find a pool of lawyers from whom to choose, solicit referrals from other professionals you know or deal with - an accountant, banker or business leader. Check out Bar Association listings as well, and don't neglect Internet research. — Laura Wasser

I spend a lot more time than any person should have to talking with lawyers and thinking about intellectual property issues. — Linus Torvalds

Unfortunately, what many people forget is that judges are just lawyers in robes. — Tammy Bruce

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

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. — Percival Everett

Priests, kings, statesmen, soldiers, bankers and public functionaries of all sorts; policemen, jailers and hangmen; capitalists, usurers, businessmen and property-owners; lawyers, economists and politicians - all of them, down to the meanest grocer, repeat in chorus the words of Voltaire, that if there were no God it would be necessary to invent Him. — Mikhail Bakunin

Blues is a natural fact, is something that a fellow lives. If you don't live it you don't have it. Young people have forgotten to cry the blues. Now they talk and get lawyers and things. — Big Bill Broonzy

True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state. — John W. Davis

We shouldn't have to be burdened with all the technicalities that come up from time to time with shrewd, smart lawyers interpreting what the laws or what the Constitution may or may not say. — Dan Quayle

Justice isn't about fixing the past; it's about healing the past's future. — Jackson Burnett

Lawyers make their cake by cooking up other people's troubles. — Margaret Deland

If you are a millionaire beset by blackmailers or anyone else to whose comfort the best legal advice is essential, and have decided to put your affairs in the hands of the ablest and discreetest firm in London, you proceed through a dark and grimy entry and up a dark and grimy flight of stairs; and, having felt your way along a dark and grimy passage, you come at length to a dark and grimy door. There is plenty of dirt in other parts of Ridgeway's Inn, but nowhere is it so plentiful, so rich in alluvial deposits, as on the exterior of the offices of Marlowe, Thorpe, Prescott, Winslow and Appleby. As you tap on the topmost of the geological strata concealing the ground-glass of the door, a sense of relief and security floods your being. For in London grubbiness is the gauge of a lawyer's respectability. — P.G. Wodehouse

American patriotism is generally something that amuses Europeans, I suppose because children look idiotic saluting the flag and because the constitution contains so many cracks through which the lawyers may creep. — Katharine Whitehorn

I look forward to a time when lawyers aren't in the top three calls every day, and all you care about is how your kids are doing in school or what the weather's like and the great day you had with your family. — Lance Armstrong

Americans could once boast proudly that their system set the benchmark for the world; the United States was the rule of law. But now what we see is the rule of lawyers, which is something different. — Niall Ferguson

One of the rookie mistakes first-time entrepreneurs often make is to be too guarded about their idea - in fact, many will actually spend their first $25,000 on patent lawyers without ever fully vetting their product. — Scott Weiss

I consider that women who are authors, lawyers, and politicians are monsters. — Pierre-Auguste Renoir

The minute you read something that you can't understand, you can almost be sure that it was drawn up by a lawyer. — Will Rogers

Sam Temple was taken by helicopter to a hospital in Los Angeles, where there were specialists there in burn injuries. He wasn't consulted: he was found on his knees, obviously in shock, extensively burned. EMTs took over.
Astrid Ellison was taken to a hospital in Santa Barbara, as was Diana Ladris.
Other kids were shared out among half a dozen hospitals. Some specialized in plastic surgery, others in the effects of starvation.
Over the next week all were seen by psychiatrists once their immediate physical injuries were addressed. Lots of psychiatrists. And when they weren't being seen by psychiatrists, they were being seen by FBI agents, and California Highway Patrol investigators, and lawyers from the district attorney's office.
The consensus seemed to be that a number of the Perdido survivors, as they were now known, would be prosecuted for crimes ranging from simple assault to murder.
First on that list was Sam Temple. — Michael Grant

The Indian diaspora is not a capital-accumulating diaspora. The Indian diaspora is doctors, lawyers, professors. Or newspaper sellers. They are basically trade- or profession-oriented, and so they're not major investors in their home country. — Jairam Ramesh

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

We are
Born like this
Into this
Into these carefully mad wars
Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
Into bars where people no longer speak to each other
Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings
Born into this
Into hospitals which are so expensive that it's cheaper to die
Into lawyers who charge so much it's cheaper to plead guilty
Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes — Charles Bukowski

Well, human rights defenders, freedom of speech advocates, lawyers that we spoke to said this is really an expansion. After the military ouster of Egypt's unpopular, but elected Islamist president in 2013, we saw political opponents being arrested by the thousands, really. Then we saw a popular comedian go off the air out of fear of retribution. — Leila Fadel

Daimons, vampires, ghouls, whatever you want to call them. They suck your blood and your soul and leave you with nothing. Kind of like lawyers. (Selena) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

In the courtroom, it's where a lawyer really becomes an actor. There's a very fine line between delivering a monologue in a play and delivering a monologue to a jury. I've always felt that way - I've been in a lot of courtrooms. The best lawyers are really theatrical. — Woody Harrelson

I've had ample contact with lawyers, and I'm convinced that the only fortune they ever leave is their own. — Wilson Mizner

Lawyers don't run sales forces. — Jeff Raikes

Others
as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders
serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very few
as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men
serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part ... — Henry David Thoreau

What she needed was someone who would take her for the whole night. Someone decent and respectable, with an apartment of his own. But how could you ever judge what men were really like? It was the young ones with the swaggering walks and the loud mouths who ended up bursting into tears and showing you pictures of their girlfriends. It was the bespectacled bankers and lawyers who liked to knock you around. — Robert Harris

As people, we have forgotten to be people. We know how to be doctors, lawyers, nurses, teachers, we know what to do, we know what to buy, but how do I just sit with you in your pain? How do I sit with you in your vulnerability and not betray you, not abuse you? We do not know how to do that, even in our homes. — Iyanla Vanzant

You may not win the Super Bowl. Your kids may not go on to be doctors and lawyers and everything may not go perfectly. That doesn't mean it was a bad plan or the wrong thing. It's just like a football season. Everything's not going to go perfect. — Tony Dungy

I believe, assume the power to decide more political than legal issues in nature, the people naturally focus less on the law and more on the lawyers that are chosen really to administer the law. — Sam Brownback

gymnasts retire at 20, cricketers at 34, actresses at 32, actors at 75, salesmen at 50, other employees at 58 or 60 years, and doctors and lawyers when their bodies do not listen to their minds. Of course, one class beats them all - politicians retire at 90! — P.V. Subramanyam

Lawyers are natural politicians. — Clarence Darrow

In third grade I thought I loved her - by sixth grade, I was sure of it — Emma Chase

So many people spend years (and money) studying to be doctors, lawyers, actors, dancers, business executives and scientists - when you're an author, you can be any of these things, and you don't need a degree or certificate; all you need is an imagination, a dream and an open mind. — Rebecca McNutt