Henry David Thoreau

We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.

The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend.

Whether the flower looks better in the nosegay than in the meadow where it grew and we had to wet our feet to get it! Is the scholastic air any advantage?

It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.

My focus now is to be the best justice I can be.

You get a lawyer whether you’re in a military tribunal or whether you’re in a federal court, number one. The attorney general decided that the court with the biggest – with the greatest venue, with the best jurisdiction was the New York court. That was the right decision to make.

The law will never make men free, it is men that have to make the law free.

In law, nothing is certain but the expense.

It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for law, so much as a respect for right.

When you go into court you are putting your fate into the hands of twelve people who weren’t smart enough to get out of jury duty.

To live outside the law, you must be honest.

An incompetent attorney can delay a trial for months or years. A competent attorney can delay one even longer.

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

Are you threatening me? If you so much as touch me I’ll have you arrested!

Judges must beware of hard constructions and strained inferences, for there is no worse torture than that of laws.

Lawyers know life practically. A bookish man should always have them to converse with.

Justice? – You get justice in the next world. In this one you have the law.

Men are not governed by justice, but by law or persuasion. When they refuse to be governed by law or persuasion, they have to be governed by force or fraud, or both.

If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.