lawyer

The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.

King Henry VI Part 2.

Lawyer, n. One skilled in circumvention of the law.

Ambrose Bierce

The Devil's Dictionary.

Will Rogers

A lawyer with a briefcase can steal more than a thousand men with guns.

Mario Puzo

It is better to be a mouse in a cat's mouth than a man in a lawyer's hands.

Spanish Proverb

Woe unto you also, ye lawyers! for ye lade men with burdens grievous to be borne.

Jesus

The Bible, Luke 11. 46.

I don't think you can make a lawyer honest by an act of legislature. You've got to work on his conscience. And his lack of conscience is what makes him a lawyer.

Will Rogers

Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. As a peacemaker the lawyer has superior opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough.

Abraham Lincoln

Litigation: A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage.

Ambrose Bierce

The Devil's Dictionary.

The good lawyer is not the man who has an eye to every side and angle of contingency, and qualifies all his qualifications, but who throws himself on your part so heartily, that he can get you out of a scrape.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The leading rule for the lawyer, as for the man of every other calling, is diligence. Leave nothing for to-morrow which can be done to-day.

Abraham Lincoln

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

Thomas Jefferson

He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides.

Charles Lamb

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

Jeremy Bentham

I busted a mirror and got seven years bad luck, but my lawyer thinks he can get me five.

Stephen Wright

My decision to become a lawyer was irrevocably sealed when I realized my father hated the legal profession.

John Grisham

If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.

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

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

Proverb

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 Lewis Mencken

The lawyer's truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency.

Henry David Thoreau

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

It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do.

Edmund Burke

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

A lawyer's relationship to justice and wisdom is on a par with a piano tuner's relationship to a concert. He neither composes the music, nor interprets it-he merely keeps the machinery running.

Lucille Kellen

I think we may class the lawyer in the natural history of monsters.

John Keats

Don't misinform your Doctor nor your Lawyer.

Benjamin Franklin

A lawyer will do anything to win a case, sometimes he will even tell the truth.

Patrick Murray

The doctor sees all the weakness of mankind; the lawyer all the wickedness, the theologian all the stupidity.

Arthur Schopenhauer

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.

We all know here that the law is the most powerful of schools for the imagination. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.

Jean Giraudoux

War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight,

The lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Queen Mab.

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

Robert Schmitt

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

Joseph Ball

America is the paradise of lawyers.

David J. Brewer

A lawyer starts life giving $500 worth of law for $5, and ends giving $5 worth for $500.

Benjamin H. Brewster

A lawyer is a learned gentleman who rescues your estate from your enemies and keeps it himself.

Henry Peter Brougham

It is an honorable calling that you have chosen. Some of you will soon be defending poor, helpless insurance companies who are constantly being sued by greedy, vicious widows and orphans trying to collect on their policies. Others will work tirelessly to protect frightened, beleaguered oil companies from being attacked by depraved consumer groups. [commencement address, Tulane University School of Law]

Art Buchwald

And God said: 'Let there be Satan, so people don't blame everything on me. And let there be lawyers, so people don't blame everything on Satan'.

George Burns

You are old, said the youth, and your jaws are too weak for anything tougher than suet; yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak. Pray, how did you do it? In my youth, said his father, I took to the law, and argued each case with my wife and the muscular strength which it gave to my jaw has lasted the rest of my life.

Lewis Carroll

Doctors are the same as lawyers; the only difference is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you too.

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

You cannot live without the lawyers, and certainly you cannot die without them.

Joseph H. Choate

The trouble with law is lawyers.

Clarence Darrow

True, we 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

A man who never graduated from school might steal from a freight car. But a man who attends college and graduates as a lawyer might steal the whole railroad.

Theodore Roosevelt

Attempting to persuade his son to become a lawyer.

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

If there were no bad people there would be no good lawyers.

Charles Dickens

I don't like lawyers, nannie. No one likes lawyers, little boy.

J. P. Donleavy

The world has its fling at lawyers sometimes, but its very denial is an admission. It feels, what I believe to be the truth, that of all secular professions this has the highest standards.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Necessity knows no law; I know some attorneys of the same.

Benjamin Franklin

A lawyer's time and advice are his stock in trade.

Abraham Lincoln

I never saw a lawyer yet who would admit he was making money.

Mary Roberts Rinehart

While law is supposed to be a device to serve society, a civilized way of helping the wheels go round without too much friction, it is pretty hard to find a group less concerned with serving society and more concerned with serving themselves than the lawyers.

Fred Rodell

The bar does not claim to be the communion of saints. It only claims to be a noble organization of fallible men, in a fallible society. It concedes that all lawyers sometimes blunder in a professional service; that many sometimes sin against professional duty; that some are incompetent and some are vicious. But it asserts its own dignity and integrity, by a greater contempt than the world has for its dunces, by a severer reprobation of its knaves.

Edmund G. Ryan

You're an attorney. It's your duty to lie, conceal and distort everything, and slander everybody.

Jean Giraudoux

There is no better way to exercise the imagination than the study of the law. No artist ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.

Jean Giradoux

Only lawyers and painters can turn white to black.