Dan Quayle Quotes

Does America really need 70 percent of the world's lawyers? … Is it healthy for our economy to have 18 million lawsuits coursing through our system annually?

The civil process has become too expensive, time-consuming, and contentious, inhibiting effective access to the courts.

[Describing lawyers:] ... men who get their living intirely from the quarrils, follys, disputes and distresses of the Many, and the intricacy of our Laws.

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

The only people who benefit from lawsuits are lawyers. I think we made a couple of them rich.

300 million Americans every day decide to settle their disputes in courts of law rather than settle them in the streets with sticks and stones.

A lawyer’s place is in the fray.

Nothing is so unproductive as the law. It is expensive whether you win or lose ...

A point concerning property, which ought, for the reasons I have just mentioned, to be most speedily decided, frequently exercises the wit of successions of lawyers, for many generations .… But the question concerning a man’s life, that great question in which no delay ought to be counted tedious, is commonly determined in twenty-four hours at the utmost. It is not to be wondered at that injustice and absurdity should be inseparable companions.

In the strange heat all litigation brings to bear on things, the very process of litigation fosters the most profound misunderstandings in the world.

... endless lawyering can prevent efficient justice

Why Lawsuits are Good for America

Whate'er is best administered is best," may truly be said of a juridical system, and the due distribution of justice depends more upon the rules by which suits are to be conducted, than on the perfection of the code by which rights are defined.

A judge's duty is to grant justice, but his practice is to delay it: even those judges who know their duty adhere to the general practice.

The laws you have already passed for the establishment of a judiciary system have opened the doors of justice to all descriptions of persons. You will consider in your wisdom whether improvements in that system may yet be made, and particularly whether a uniform process of execution on sentences issuing from the Federal courts be not desirable through all the States.

Gentlemen, you cannot live without the lawyers, and certainly you cannot die without them.

Conflicts that in Sweden and Japan would be solved by quiet consultations … through the bureaucracy are fought out through formal litigation in the American court system.

Lawsuits generally originate with the obstinate and the ignorant, but they do not end with them; and that lawyer was right who left all his money to the support of an asylum for fools and lunatics, saying that from such he got it, and to such he would bequeath it.

Justice is not cheap. Justice is not quick. It is not ever finally achieved.

The time has come for professional jurors.

Listen, we all have to agree that there is too much litigation going on in this world. But every year it seems to multiply tenfold. Why can't we stop it? Well, it's because the lawmakers in Congress and the Senate are almost all lawyers, too!

Lawyers (are) operators of the toll bridge across which anyone in search of justice has to pass.

The trouble with law is lawyers.

Americans have grown a great deal more realistic about lawyers and the law. I think that's all for the good. A lot of people will say to you these days, 'If you are looking for justice, don't go to a courtroom.' That's just a more realistic perspective on what happens in the legal process.

The work is challenging, interesting and an important part of our legal system.