Lawyer Quotes
1. It is a pleasant world we live in, sir, a very pleasant world. There are bad people in it, Mr. Richard, but if there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers.
2. Politicians were mostly people who’d had too little morals and ethics to stay lawyers.
3. The minute you read something that you can’t understand, you can almost be sure that it was drawn up by a lawyer.
4. We are all honorable men here, we do not have to give each other assurances as if we were lawyers.
5. There comes a time in your life when you can no longer put off choosing. You have to choose one path or the other. You can live safe and be protected by people just like you, or you can stand up and be a leader for what is right. Always, remember this: People never remember the crowd; they remember the one person that had the courage to say and do what no one would do.
6. Some Christian lawyers—some eminent and stupid judges—have said and still say, that the Ten Commandments are the foundation of all law.
Nothing could be more absurd. Long before these commandments were given there were codes of laws in India and Egypt—laws against murder, perjury, larceny, adultery and fraud. Such laws are as old as human society; as old as the love of life; as old as industry; as the idea of prosperity; as old as human love.
All of the Ten Commandments that are good were old; all that were new are foolish. If Jehovah had been civilized he would have left out the commandment about keeping the Sabbath, and in its place would have said: ‘Thou shalt not enslave thy fellow-men.’ He would have omitted the one about swearing, and said: ‘The man shall have but one wife, and the woman but one husband.’ He would have left out the one about graven images, and in its stead would have said: ‘Thou shalt not wage wars of extermination, and thou shalt not unsheathe the sword except in self-defence.’
If Jehovah had been civilized, how much grander the Ten Commandments would have been.
All that we call progress—the enfranchisement of man, of labor, the substitution of imprisonment for death, of fine for imprisonment, the destruction of polygamy, the establishing of free speech, of the rights of conscience; in short, all that has tended to the development and civilization of man; all the results of investigation, observation, experience and free thought; all that man has accomplished for the benefit of man since the close of the Dark Ages—has been done in spite of the Old Testament.
7. I was half lawyer; I always noticed the loopholes.
8. You have the maturity of a 14-year-old boy!“ Kennedy hisses.
“And you have the chest of one.
9. You advised him not to get a lawyer, giving as one of your reasons the opinion that lawyers are a pain in the ass. Gentlemen, the pain is here.
10. Divorce lawyers stoke anger and fear in their clients, knowing that as long as the conflicts remain unresolved the revenue stream will keep flowing.
11. All we know about the new economic world tells us that nations which train engineers will prevail over those which train lawyers. No nation has ever sued its way to greatness.
12. Don’t forget that we lawyers, we’re a higher breed of intellect, and so it’s our privilege to lie. It’s as clear as day. Animals can’t even imagine lying: if you were to find yourself among some wild islanders, they too would only speak the truth until they learned about European culture.
13. It is strange the way that someone who wants to find you guilty can start to make you believe in your own guilt, even when you know you are innocent. I was afraid I would condemn myself my mistake.
14. Claude rubs the back of his neck and wrinkles his nose, about to tell me he was never sad. I believe this is called bravado and is not limited to lawyers, or even men, although that combination makes it almost unavoidable.
15. But they argued as lawyers do, they twisted every answer I gave until it sounded like the opposite meaning, and I became so confused and afraid I found myself agreeing to statements that I knew were not true.
16. When cops are on the job they love lawyers like lions love hyenas, only minus the mutual respect.
17. A heart can only discover what it really wants with experience.
18. The two men were greedily hunched over the table, like two wolves disputing a carcass, but their muttered speech in the echoing hall resembled more the grunting of pigs. One was less than a wolf: he was a public prosecutor. The other was more than a pig, he was a chief commissioner of police.
19. Mathias shrugged. After all, a criminal lawyer is not concerned with facts. He is concerned with probabilities. It is the novelist who is concerned with facts, whose job it is to say what a particular man did do on a particular occasion: the lawyer does not, cannot be expected to go further than show what the ordinary man would be most likely to do under presumed circumstances.
20. Lawyers were notorious for finding cases in the most unlikely places, especially ones with huge potential damagers awards.
21. There is hardly any political question in the United States that sooner or later does not turn into a judicial question. From that, the obligation that the parties find in their daily polemics to borrow ideas and language from the judicial system. Since most public men are or have formerly been jurists, they make the habits and the turn of ideas that belong to jurists pass into the handling of public affairs. The jury ends up by familiarizing all classes with them. Thus, judicial language becomes, in a way, the common language; so the spirit of the jurist, born inside the schools and courtrooms, spreads little by little beyond their confines; it infiltrates all of society, so to speak; it descends to the lowest ranks, and the entire people finishes by acquiring a part of the habits and tastes of the magistrate.
22. 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.
23. I find as I grow older, I love those most, whom I loved first.
24. He recognized it and knew it. In others—clients, witnesses, or sometimes adversaries, he had seen or heard it: A gesture, a phrase, or a tone which exposed unintended truth in the beat of a second.
25. If you don’t start playing by my rules, you’ll be lucky to be licking stamps in some lowly, legal aid office.
26. [The clerk] held in front of him a scroll with a red wax seal affixed, the kind of thing believed to make a document official – or at least expensive and difficult to understand, which, in fact, amounts to the same thing.
27. There’s something oddly comforting about talking to a legal guy once the billable hours clock has started running; you have passed the magical point at which a lawyer becomes your lawyer. Your lawyer is warm, your lawyer is sympathetic, your lawyer makes notes on a yellow pad and nods in all the right places. Most of the questions your lawyer asks are questions you can answer. And if you can’t your lawyer will help you find a way to do so, by God. Your lawyer is always on your side. Your enemies are his enemies. To him you are never shit but always Shinola.
28. Beware of a client who’s suing on principle and paying by the hour. He rarely gets his money’s worth.
29. Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.
30. A lawyer is basically a mouth, like a shark is a mouth attached to a long gut. The business of lawyers is to talk, to interrupt one another, and to devour each other if possible.
31. But [Stanley Wade] instead removed his glasses and wiped his eyes. They were moist not from fear but from the harsh reality of being confronted by one of his victims. How many others were out there? Why had he chosen to spend his career screwing these people?
32. The law is so complex and voluminous
that no one, not even the most knowledgeable lawyer, can understand it
all. Moreover, lawyers and legal scholars have not gone out of their way
to make the law accessible to the ordinary person. Just the opposite: Legal
professionals, like the priests of some obscure religion, too often try to
keep the law mysterious and inaccessible.
33. The land was torn apart in a legal dispute. Soon it was so devastated, nothing could live here- not plant or animal. Only lawyers. But eventually the place fell into lawlessness, and lawyers can’t exist in an area of lawlessness, so they went feral. Some say they still roam the land. You’ll suddenly hear someone yell, ‘Objection!’ and then you’ll be torn apart like an improperly witnessed contract.
34. On social barriers, VJ Simon, the Indian-Jewish venture capitalist in The Best People observed: “Some of those rich and powerful people I met risked a few dollars with me. They only risked money. They didn’t risk their social status. We never met at one of their clubs. We had lunch at Elegante. I thought of it as the five o’ clock curtain.
35. The Laches Doctrine is one of my favorites to practice daily
36. I love the order of deal making, the clarity oof language–how there is little room for interpretation and none for error. I love the black-and-white terms.
37. All you know is what I told you.’
Philip nodded. ‘That’s right.’
‘So did it occur to you that I might have left something out? That I might only have told you the evidence that supported the case I was trying to make?
38. The Law court is not a place for fairness. It is merely a place where good lawyers are separated from the bad ones, and the great ones from the good ones.
39. It’s kind of funny to me listening to people who claim to have these great records of winning a hundred and some odd straight felony cases without a loss and that kind of stuff that you hear all the time. I’m here to tell you, if you let me pick out which hundred cases I get to try, I’ll win a hundred of them in a row, too. Case selection is everything in creating records like that. My philosophy was, I tried them all. If I made a determination that the evidence was sufficient to justify the prosecution, then I would try the case, and certainly whenever you do that, you’re going to lose a certain percentage of them.
40. Professional legalists were absolutely prohibited from Gowachin judicial service. “Let the people judge.
41. The other amazing thing about prosecution that prosecutors don’t realize while they are in the job is the time they have available to them as opposed to lawyers in the private practice of law. Prosecutors have an incredible amount of time to sit with one another around their offices and talk. Talk about war stories. Talk about this or that cop. Talk about the case. That’s what floored me the most when I got out of it – how much free time I’d had and didn’t realize it.
42. Most cases are won and lost on their facts. We can only make any sort of difference in the small minority. Results are important, of course, but in the long run, things will always even themselves out. The better barristers will win more cases than they lose, and the poorer will level the statistic. All that’s expected of you is to do your very best. Be honest, fair and fearless, and you won’t go far wrong.
43. You advised him not to get a lawyer, giving as one of your reasons the opinion that lawyers are a pain in the ass. Gentlemen, the pain is here.
44. My expectation with the police murder of George Floyd is that the police lawyers will lie, confuse and deny.
45. It is true that some public defenders are good lawyers and want to be effective advocates, but the institution is structured, so as to discourage their efforts.
46. There are no facts anymore, kiddo. only good or bad fiction.
47. You want a story? Fine I’ll tell you a story. a true story. Back in 2009. A lot of things were going wrong in 2009… I would go to a room to talk to lawyers about various employers not paying their people enough money. Different thoughts would run through my head. For instance, why, instead of just paying people their wages (it’s not that hard, minimum wage plus overtime where applicable) is this business paying a ridiculous lawyer to come and try to bullshit me… or something. A few years later a different thought would pop in my mind from time to time. Why would the United states federal government hire a hardcore alcoholic like myself (thanks to the University of Michigan) to enforce these Labor laws and run around with a badge and stuff. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only one.
48. That is why, in the course of human history, truth-telling has been designated as the highest of virtues in every culture, and why the credibility that results therefrom is always so powerful.
49. Should we trust the scientists and the so called experts that created the endless parade of pharmaceutical concoctions that we see advertised on TV? ads that are soon discontinued as they’re followed up by an avalanche of commercials from legal firms inviting people who are permanently damaged or worse from last week’s big pharma witch’s Brew to sue for damages…
50. Workers Compensation lawyers are one of the most toxic groups of people I have met in life.
51. What is true of asset managers is true of lawyers. Willem Buiter, former Chief Economist for Citigroup, puts it aptly: the first third of lawyers produce the immense social value we know as the ‘rule of law’. The next third are working on legal disputes that are essentially zero-sum games: each side over-invests in winning the tournament and so they are socially useless….The final third of lawyers are socially predatory: they are employed in the legal scams that fleece the productive.
52. If no one had an army, armies would not be needed. But the same can be said of most lobbyists, PR specialists, telemarketers, and corporate lawyers. Also, like literal goons, they have a largely negative impact on society. I think almost anyone would concur that, were all telemarketers to disappear, the world would be a better place. But I think most would also agree that if all corporate lawyers, bank lobbyists, or marketing gurus were to similarly vanish in a puff of smoke, the world would be at least a little bit more bearable.
53. St. Genesius is the patron saint of clowns and lawyers. Clearly, the Lord doesn’t always work in mysterious ways.
54. All suspects should be given the chance to telephone their lawyers or their mothers, and it would not be surprising if they chose to call their mothers. After all, your mother is fall more likely to believe in your innocence than your lawyer.
55. In my most desperate moments, I have never conceived of anything more horrible than a law office.
56. Here, paper shuffling was treated seriously, and as a task of great difficulty.
57. He never quarreled with his wife, but he never talked to her;–he never had time to talk, he was so taken up with speaking.
58. Like Paddy Moran says about being a divorce lawyer: “Clients call us at their darkest hour. Whether they want out or their spouse does, they’re angry, hurt and anxious or just plain vindictive. We become their new best friends. At some point, it’s over, and it’s like we never existed. Bye-bye, best friends. Usually, they never want to hear from us again.
59. You’re lucky you chose Houston. It’s a true meritocracy here. I’m from Dallas, which is more closed. Houston is wide open. Here, you work hard, you succeed. It doesn’t matter who your parents or grandparents were. Nearly all doors are open. If one isn’t, you build your own door and march right through it.
60. You got that right, buddy,” Paddy thought, but what Frost saw was a man nodding his dead in a knowing and sympathetic way. Paddy had learned the trick from a funeral parlor director in Brooklyn.
