Quotes by American Authors - Page 141

Laws too gentle are seldom obeyed too severe seldom executed.
Benjamin Franklin
After an existence of nearly twenty years of almost innocuous desuetude these laws are brought forth.
Grover Cleveland
The aim of law is the maximum gratification of the nervous system of man.
Learned Hand
Law is nothing unless close behind it stands a warm living public opinion.
Wendell Phillips
An appeal is when ye ask wan court to show its contempt for another court.
Finley Peter Dunne
The law must be stable and yet it must not stand still.
Roscoe Pound
Well I don't know as I want a lawyer to tell me what I cannot do. I hire him to tell me how to do what I want to do.
J.P. Morgan
In cross-examination as in fishing nothing is more ungainly than a fisherman pulled into the water by his catch.
Louis Nizer
To some lawyers all facts are created equal.
Felix Frankfurter
I know of no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution.
Ulysses S. Grant
I understand you undertake to overthrow my undertaking.
Gertrude Stein
A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
H.L. Mencken
An excess of law inescapably weakens the rule of law.
Laurence H. Tribe
A successful lawsuit is the one worn by a policeman.
Robert Frost
Fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalized medium of reason that's all we have standing between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled undisciplined feeling.
Felix Frankfurter
No man is above the law and no man is below it: nor do we ask any man's permission when we ask him to obey it.
Theodore Roosevelt
The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
In America an acquittal doesn't mean you're innocent it means you beat the rap. My clients lose even when they win.
F. Lee Bailey
Litigant: a person about to give up his skin for the hope of retaining his bone.
Ambrose Bierce
A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.
Robert Frost
No matter whether the Constitution follows the flag or not the Supreme Court follows the election returns.
Finley Peter Dunne
Show me the man and I'll show you the law.
David Ferguson
Law ... begins when someone takes to doing something someone else does not like.
Karl Llewellyn
You are remembered for the rules you break.
Douglas MacArthur
Lawyers spend a great deal of time shovelling smoke.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
It usually takes 100 years to make a law and then after it's done its work it usually takes 100 years to be rid of it.
Henry Ward Beecher
It is as if the ordinary language we use every day has a hidden set of signals a kind of secret code.
William Stafford
Appeal in law: to put the dice into the box for another throw.
Ambrose Bierce
Laugh and the world laughs with you Weep and you weep alone For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth But has trouble enough of its own.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Language is not an abstract construction of the learned or of dictionary-makers but is something arising out of the work needs ties joys affections tastes of long generations of humanity and has its bases broad and low close to the ground.
Walt Whitman
Language as well as the faculty of speech was the immediate gift of God.
Noah Webster
Divorce is a game played by lawyers.
Cary Grant
The small landholders are the most precious part of a state.
Thomas Jefferson
If a man own land the land owns him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Mary had a little lamb It's fleece was white as snow And everywhere that Mary went The lamb was sure to go.
Sarah J. Hale
Shall you complain who feed the world? Who clothe the world? Who house the world? Shall you complain who are the world Of what the world may do? As from this hour You use your power The world must follow you!
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
A truly American sentiment recognises the dignity of labor and the fact that honor lies in honest toil.
Grover Cleveland
For as labor cannot produce without the use of land the denial of the equal right to use of land is necessarily the denial of the right of labor to its own produce.
Henry George
Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
They know enough who know how to learn.
Henry Adams
To know that we know what we know and that we do not know what we do not know that is true knowledge.
Henry David Thoreau
It isn't what we don't know that gives us trouble it's what we know that ain't so.
Will Rogers
The specialist is a man who fears the other subjects.
Martin H. Fisher
We should live and learn but by the time we've learned it's too late to live.
Carolyn Wells
The first problem for all of us men and women is not to learn but to unlearn.
Gloria Steinem
Anyone who stops learning is old whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.
Henry Ford
Everybody gets so much common information all day long that they lose their common sense.
Gertrude Stein
I do not pretend to know what many ignorant men are sure of.
Clarence Darrow
Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.
Will Durant
We're drowning in information and starving for knowledge.
Rutherford D. Rogers
There are two kinds of statistics the kind you look up and the kind you make up.
Rex Stout
President Reagan didn't always know what he knew.
Oliver North
Little minds are interested in the extraordinary great minds in the commonplace.
Elbert Hubbard
I have tried to know absolutely nothing about a great many things and I have succeeded fairly well.
Robert Benchley
It was thy kiss Love that made me immortal.
Margaret Fuller
The sword of the law should never fall but on those whose guilt is so apparent as to be pronounced by their friends as well as foes.
Thomas Jefferson
There is no such thing as justice - in or out of court.
Clarence Darrow
This is a court of law young man not a court of justice.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
I always felt from the beginning that you had to defend people you disliked and feared as well as those you admired.
Roger Baldwin