The Quotes canon
Sourced and curated.
Every quote has been curated by hand and carefully authenticated.
Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
William Shakespeare2 quotes
Good counselors lack no clients. — William Shakespeare · 1616The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. — William Shakespeare · 1594Charles Dickens1 quote
The one great principle of the English law is to make business for itself. — Charles Dickens · 1853Elle's Father1 quote
Law school is for people who are boring and ugly and serious. — Elle's Father · 2001Henry Peter Brougham1 quote
An advocate, by the sacred duty which he owes his client, knows, in the discharge of that office, but one person in the world, that client and none other. To save that client... Is the highest and most unquestioned of his duties; And he must not regard the alarm, the suffering, the torment, the destruction which he may bring upon any other. Nay... He must go on reckless of the consequences, if his fate, it should unhappily be, to involve his country in confusion for his client's protection. — Henry Peter Brougham · 1820Jimmy Carter1 quote
We have the heaviest concentration of lawyers on Earth-1 for every 500 Americans, three times as many as are in England, four times as many as are in West Germany, twenty-one times as many as are in West Germany, twenty-one times as many as there are in Japan. We have more litigation, but I am not sure that we have more justice. No resources of talent and training in our own society, even including the medical care, is more wastefully or unfairly distributed than legal skills. Ninety percent of our lawyer serves 10 percent of our people. We are over-lawyered and under-represented. — Jimmy Carter · 1978John Gay1 quote
I know you Lawyers can, with ease,
Twist words and meanings as you please;
That language, by your skill made pliant,
Will bend to favour every client. — John Gay · 1732John W. Davis1 quote
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 our 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 · 1946Jonathan Swift1 quote
I said there was a society of men among us bred up from their youth in the art of proving by words multiplied for the purpose that white is black and black is white, according as they are paid. To this society all the rest of the people are slaves. — Jonathan Swift · 1726Louis Brandeis1 quote
Instead of holding a position of independence, between the wealthy and the people, prepared to curb the excesses of either, able lawyers have, to a large extent, allowed themselves to become adjuncts of great corporations and have neglected the obligation to use their powers for the protection of the people. We hear much of the "corporation lawyer," and far too little of the "people's lawyer." — Louis Brandeis · 1905Mario Puzo1 quote
A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns. — Mario Puzo · 1969Samuel Johnson1 quote
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 injustice of the cause is to be decided by the judge. — Samuel Johnson · 1773Thomas More1 quote
They have no lawyers among them, for they consider them as a sort of people whose profession it is to disguise matters. — Thomas More · 1516