lawyer quotes

   When you see a lawyer trying to pick a smart jury, you know he's got a strong case.

- F(rancis) Lee Bailey
  In the Los  Angeles Times, 9  Jan.

I do not deal with subtleties; I am only a lawyer.

- F(rederick) E(dwin) Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead
Quoted in Richard Fountain The Wit of the Wig (1968).

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

- Edmund Burke
  On Conciliation with  America.

A client is fain to hire a lawyer to keep from the injury of other lawyersas Christians that travel inTurkeyare forced to hire Janissaries, to protect them from the insolencies of otherTurks.

- Samuel Butler
  Prose Observations.

A lawyer's dream of heaven: every man reclaimed his own propertyat the resurrection, and each tried to recover it from all his forefathers.

- Samuel Butler
Collected in Further Extracts from the Notebooks (1934).

It is alarming and odious to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious MiddleTemple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well-known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the vice-regal palace, while he is still conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King- Emperor.

- Lord Randolph Henry Spencer Churchill
  Speech, 23 Feb.

Nous savons tous ici que le droit est la plus puissante des e  coles de l'imagination. Jamais poe'  te n'a interpre  te   la nature aussi librement qu'un juriste la re  alite  . We all know here that the law is the most powerful of schools for the imagination. No poet ever interpreted nature as freelyas a lawyer interprets the truth.

- (Hippolyte) Jean Giraudoux
  La Guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu, act 2, sc.5.

A lawyer has no business with the justice or injustice of the cause which he undertakes, unless his client asks his opinion, and then he is bound to give it honestly. The justice or unjustice of the cause is to be decided by the judge. 444

- Samuel known as Dr Johnson Johnson
  Remark,15  Aug. Quoted in James Boswell The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785).

All my house, But now, steamed like a bath with her thick breath. A lawyer could not have been heard; nor scarce Another woman, such a hail of words She has let fall.

- Ben Jonson
  Of Lady Politic Would-be. Volpone, act 3, sc.5.

Courage is the most important attribute of a lawyer.

- Robert F(rancis) Kennedy
  Speech at the University of San Francisco Law School, 29 Sep.

[Jeremy] Bentham held no post at the mercy of bankers and tripe sellers; he was a man of independent means, a lawyer and politician and a heretic in general practice. It is impossible to imagine such a man occupying a chair at Harvard or Princeton.Hehad a hand intoomany pies; he was too rebellious and contumacious; he had too little respect for authority, either academic or worldly. Moreover, his mind was too wide for a professor; he Mencken could never remain safely in a groove; the whole field of social organization invited his inquiries and experiments.

- H(enry) L(ouis) Mencken
  'The Dismal Science', in The Smart Set,  Jun.

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

- Mario Puzo
  The Godfather, bk.1, ch.1.

Why is there always a secret singing When a lawyer cashes in? Why does a hearse horse snicker Hauling a lawyer away?

- Carl Sandburg
  Smoke and Steel,'The Lawyers KnowToo Much'.

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

- Hunter S(tockton) Thompson
  Letter to The Champion, a legal journal, Jul.

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

- Henry David Thoreau
  Civil Disobedience.

No life, my honest scholar, no life so happyand so pleasant as the life of a well-governed angler; for when the lawyer is swallowed up with business, and the statesman is preventing or contriving plots, then we sit on cowslip-banks, hear the birds sing, and possess ourselves in as much quietness as these silver streams, which we now see glide so quietly by us.

- Izaak Walton
  The Compleat Angler, pt.1, ch.5.