Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Related Quotes

Francis Osborn

What you leave at your death let it be without controversy, else the lawyers will be your heirs.

Character | Controversy | Death | Will |

Benjamin Franklin

A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats.

Wisdom |

Francis Osborn

What you leave at your death, let it be without controversy, else the lawyers will be your heirs.

Controversy | Death | Will | Wisdom |

Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It's irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.

Hell | History | Life | Life | Truth | World |

Felix Rohatyn, fully Felix George Rohatyn

Beware of lawyers and consultants and people who do not take risks and who do not get their hands dirty.

People |

Jimmy Carter, fully James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr.

We have the heaviest concentration of lawyers on Earth—one for every five-hundred Americans; three times as many as are in England, four 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 lawyers serve 10 percent of our people. We are over-lawyered and under-represented.

Training | Talent |

Barbara Ehrenreich, born Barbara Alexander

It seems to me that there must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the earth can sustain, and that human civilization will collapse when the number of, say, tax lawyers exceeds the world's total population of farmers, weavers, fisherpersons, and pediatric nurses.

Civilization | Earth | Will |

Raymond Moley, fully Raymond Charles Moley

The antithesis of democracy is class dictatorship, whether by groups of bankers, investors, managers, politicians, lawyers or union members. Over a considerable part of the world the unspeakable doctrine is being preached that the ideal of a democratic State is a snare and a delusion. A politician if he denies the existence of the essentials of democracy and denies it in such a way as to create class feeling, is not working in the interest of democracy even though he protests to the high heavens that that is his objective.

Antithesis | Democracy | Doctrine | Existence | World |

R. D. Blackmore, fully Richard Doddridge Blackmore

It seemed to me that if the lawyers failed to do their duty, they ought to pay people for waiting upon them, instead of making them pay for it.

People | Waiting |

Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon

Look at the Justice Department, it's full of Jews...The lawyers in government are damn Jews.

Government | Justice | Government |

Robert Burton

Our wrangling lawyers . . . are so litigious and busy here on earth, that I think they will plead their clients' causes hereafter, some of them in hell.

Will | Think |

Robert Burton

The rich Physician, honor'd Lawyers ride, Whilst the poor Scholar foots it by their side.

Scholar |

Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

If misery be the effect of virtue, it ought to be reverenced; if of ill-fortune, to be pitied; and if of vice, not to be insulted, because it is, perhaps, itself a punishment adequate to the crime by which it was produced; and the humanity of that man can deserve no panegyric who is capable of reproaching a criminal in the hands of the executioner.

Man | Trial |

Thomas Jefferson

If the question [before justices of the peace] relate to any point of public liberty, or if it be one of those in which the judges may be suspected of bias, the jury undertake to decide both law and fact.

Body | Business | People | Present | Question | Business |

Thomas Jefferson

On every unauthoritative exercise of power by the legislature must the people rise in rebellion or their silence be construed into a surrender of that power to them? If so, how many rebellions should we have had already?

Opinion | Question |

Thomas Jefferson

It is the will of the nation which makes the law obligatory; it is their will which vacates or annihilates the organ which is to declare and announce it.

Question |

Thomas Jefferson

The law of self-preservation is higher than written law.

Attention | Daring | Enough | Government | Law | Lord | Majority | Man | Opinion | Practice | Public | Responsibility | Will | Government |

Thomas Jefferson

That peace, safety, and concord may be the portion of our native land, and be long enjoyed by our fellow-citizens, is the most ardent wish of my heart, and if I can be instrumental in procuring or preserving them, I shall think I have not lived in vain.

Business | Business |

Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

Call me a “rube” and a “hick,” but I’d lot rather be the man who bought the Brooklyn Bridge than the man who sold it.

Association | Convention | Law | Wrong | Association |

Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

All there is to politics is trading. That’s why politics is not as good as it was years ago. They don’t have as many old-time horse traders in there. These we got are just amateurs. They’re crude with their trades. There is really no “finesse.” You might not get that. “Finesse” is a French word and it means sneaking it over.

Blame | Convention | Good | Nothing | Right | Old |