Edmund Burke Quotes

Lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law is not punished.

Being a lawyer, it's like holding a key card to a parallel dimension of rule sets in the world, and it's lovely to make sure that key continues to work and to continue to brush up on the law every so often.

Lawyers belong to the people by birth and interest, and to the aristocracy by habit and taste; they may be looked upon as the connecting link of the two great classes of society.

I debated between law school and divinity.

No brilliance is needed in the law. Nothing but common sense, and relatively clean finger nails.

I passed the Bar on the first shot, But I have never practiced law.

Godliness, as well as the doctrine of our faith, is a mystery.

It doesn't make sense for me to be a lawyer in a place where there is no law.

A professorship of theology should have no place in our institution.

My feeling, of course, is that it's ludicrous to try to prove God's existence by science. God has nothing to do with science. God has all to do with soul, and who can explain that?

I always saw law as a performance, just like being on a stage.

Theology is ignorance with wings.

One is sometimes glad not to be a great theologian; one might easily mistake it for being a good Christian.

What is god, what is not god, what is between man and god, who shall say?

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

Theology is an attempt to explain a subject by men who do not understand it. The intent is not to tell the truth but to satisfy the questioner.

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

I'm a lawyer. I make lawyers for a living.

Next to the ministry I know of no more noble profession than the law. The object aimed at is justice, equal and exact, and if it does not reach that end at once it is because the stream is diverted by selfishness or checked by ignorance. Its principles ennoble and its practice elevates.

God — the John Doe of philosophy and religion.

Every lawyer of experience comes to know (more or less unconsciously) that in the great majority of cases, the precedents are none too good as bases of prediction. Somehow or other, there are plenty of precedents to go around.

Major Greene this evening fell into some conversation with me about the Divinity and satisfaction of Jesus Christ. All the argument he advanced was, "that a mere creature or finite being could not make satisfaction to infinite justice for any crimes," and that "these things are very mysterious." Thus mystery is made a convenient cover for absurdity.

Lawyers are necessary in a community. Some of you...take a different view; but as I am a member of that legal profession, or was at one time, and have only lost standing in it to become a politician, I still retain the pride of the profession. And I still insist that it is the law and the lawyer that make popular government under a written constitution and written statutes possible.

The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science.

The study of theology, as it stands in Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authorities; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and it admits of no conclusion.