We invite you to comment or add your favorite to the following collection of well-known quotations written by and about lawyers and the law*

*Submissions will be checked for authenticity and relevancy before they are posted.
*Quotations selected for publication are at the discretion of the webmaster.


A lawyer without books would be like a workman without tools.

– Thomas Jefferson

If you don’t get a lawyer who knows law then get the one who knows the Judge!.

– Unknown

A lawyer‘s time and advice are his stock in trade

– Abraham Lincoln

The leading rule for the lawyer … is diligence. Leave nothing for tomorrow which can be done today.

– Abraham Lincoln

“I shall not rest until every German sees that it is a shameful thing to be a lawyer.”

– Adolph Hitler

A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.

– Robert Frost

Lawyer: One who protects us from robbers by taking away the temptation

– Henry Louis Mencken

The power of the lawyer is in the uncertainty of the law

– Jeremy Bentham

He who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client

– Proverbs

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

Don’t misinform your Doctor nor your Lawyer

– Benjamin Franklin

Most people aren’t appreciated enough, and the bravest things we do in our lives are usually known only to ourselves. No one throws ticker tape on the man who chose to be faithful to his wife, on the lawyer who didn’t take the drug money…

– Peggy Noonan

Law students are trained in the case method, and to the lawyer everything in life looks like a case.

– Edward Packard, Jr.

The average lawyer is essentially a mechanic who works with a pen instead of a ball peen hammer.

– Robert Schmitt

What a holler would ensue if people had to pay the minister as much to marry them as they have to pay a lawyer to get them a divorce.

– Claire Trevor

A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect.

– Sir Walter Scott

“Don’t give me paper – I can get the same lawyer who drew it up to break it. But if you shake my hand, that’s for life.”

Jerry Lewis

“One of the things I was taught in law school is that I’d never be able to think the same again – that being a lawyer is something that’s part of who I am as an individual now.”

Anita Hill

“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 …The best lawyers are really theatrical.”

Woody Harrelson

“Going to trial with a lawyer who considers your whole life-style a Crime in Progress is not a happy prospect.”

Hunter S. Thompson

I’m a lawyer. I go for due process; I go for fairness and equity – these values mean a lot to me.

Mohamed ElBaradei

“Baseball is almost the only orderly thing in a very unorderly world. If you get three strikes, even the best lawyer in the world can’t get you off.”

Bill Veeck

“If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers.”

Charles Dickens

“The clearest way to show what the rule of law means to us in everyday life is to recall what has happened when there is no rule of law.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower

“The magistrates are the ministers for the laws, the judges their interpreters, the rest of us are servants of the law, that we all may be free.”

– Marcus Tulius Cicero

“The law is reason, free from passion.”

Aristotle

“It is the trade of lawyers to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour.”

Thomas Jefferson

“Where the law ends tyranny begins.”

– Henry Fielding

Laws are like sausages. It is better not to see them being made.”

– Otto von Bismarck

“I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.”

– Alexander Solzhenitzyn

“Gentlemen, a court is no better than each man of you sitting before me on this jury.”

– Atticus Finch,  from To Kill a Mockingbird

“We protect the unknown.”

– Charlie Ward

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