22 Quotes Tagged: lawyers

In answer to which, I assured his honor that in all points out of their [lawyers'] own trade, they were usually the most ignorant and stupid generation among us, the most despicable in common conversation, avowed enemies to all knowledge and learning; and equally disposed to pervert the general reason of mankind, in every other subject of discourse as in that of their own profession.

I believe you keep a lawyer. I have always kept a lawyer, too, though I have never made anything out of him.

To succeed in other trades, capacity must be shown; in the law, concealment of it will do.

(Lincoln's) experience as a lawyer compelled him not only to see that there is a principle underlying every phenomenon in human affairs, but that there are always two sides to every question, both of which must be fully understood in order to understand either, and that it is of greater advantage to an advocate to appreciate the strength than the weakness of his antagonist’s position.

Ordinary human laws are the means — however imperfect — by which we express our understanding of the enduring moral law.

Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.

Politicians were mostly people who'd had too little morals and ethics to stay lawyers.

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.

Shabelsky: Doctors are the same as lawyers, the sole difference being that lawyers only rob you, but doctors rob you and kill you too...

I find as I grow older, I love those most, whom I loved first.

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.

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.

The lawyers of the United States form a party which is but little feared and scarcely perceived, which has no badge peculiar to itself, which adapts itself with great flexibility to the exigencies of the time, and accommodates itself to all the movements of the social body; but this party extends over the whole community, and it penetrates into all classes of society; it acts upon the country imperceptibly, but it finally fashions it to suit its purposes.

When a fellow says that it ain't the money but the principle of the thing, it's the money.

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.