Top 73 Quotes & Sayings by Gerry Spence

Is there anyone I wouldn't take as a client? Well, I'd never represent a banker.

The function of the law is not to provide justice or to preserve freedom. The function of the law is to keep those who hold power, in power.

Government is operated by deeply embedded, hopelessly entangled bureaus where nothing is accomplished because the function of the bureau is to intercept every living idea and smother it.

What the insurance companies have done is to reverse the business so that the public at large insures the insurance companies.

I cherish the fantasy, even the hope, of adventures in other realms to come. But how can we choke out that most precious of all gifts, life, with the rope of religion around our necks? It chokes out freedom with dogma. It pinions us to the stake of superstition.

The people of a nation are enslaved when, together, they are helpless to institute effective change, when the people serve the government more than the government serves them.

The best antidote for crime is justice. The irony we often fail to appreciate is that the more justice people enjoy, the fewer crimes they commit. Crime is the natural offspring of an unjust society.

Our willingness to openly reveal our feelings in our argument nearly always builds our credibility.

The art of arguing is the art of living. We argue because we must, because life emends it, because, in the end, life itself is but an argument.

Lawyers should be chosen because they can demonstrate a history rich in human traits, the ability to care, the courage to fight, the will to win, a concern for the human condition, a passion for justice and simple uncompromising honesty. These are the traits of the lawyer.

Nearly every day on the television set the hero cop breaks into the bad guy's house and beats a confession out of him and we cheer on the cop. Propaganda smears our clear vision. It causes us to accept the diminishment of our constitutional protections as something to be lauded - after all, the cop was protecting us.

The erosion of a nation's concern for life and for individual rights, has always preceded the intrusion of tyranny.

The way people move is their autobiography in motion.

No artist's masterpiece can match a mother's creation of a successful child, one who has been freed to explore and to grow. ... Success is measured not only by who we are, but by what gifts we give. As the old chief said, "The gift is not complete until it is given again." Ah, the mother whose gift to the world is a person !

To bargain freedom for security is the devil's bargain. Having made the bargain, one enjoys neither freedom nor security.

My intent is to tell the truth as I know it, realizing that what is true for me may be blasphemy for others.

It is an anomaly that we can split the atom, but we are nearly powerless to persuade each other to embrace justice.

Teach the child to respect that which is not respectable and you teach the child the first requirement of slavery: submission to unjust authority. Children are persons. They are small persons whose perfect souls have not yet been ground through the meat grinder of slavery.

The Internet...has become the voice of the people in the first genuine experiment in democracy yet conducted in America. It stands ready to serve every facet, every faction.

Under any religion, the preestablished impersonal code transcends the right of the individual to explore, experience, and marvel at the mysteries of his own life and death. Religions introduce us not to God but to slavery. They deprive us of our freedom to explore our own souls and to discover the endless and wondrous possibilities presented to us by an infinite universe. And most often the method of religions is fear, not love. They demand blind obedience and often obedience to dreadful dogma.

Prejudice locks the mind. Nothing can enter. Nothing true can escape.

We could advance the human race enormously if we but learned to communicate honestly with our neighbors.

Skepticism, not cleanliness, is next to godliness. Skepticism is the father of freedom. It is like the pry that holds open the door for truth to slip in.

When any system has for its goal the advancement of the system over the betterment of its individual members, such a system is embedded in slavery.

The true test of liberty is the right to test it, the right to question it, the right to speak to my neighbors, to grab them by the shoulders and look into their eyes and ask, “Are we free?” I have thought that if we are free, the answer cannot hurt us. And if we are not free, must we not hear the answer?

A new fascism promises security from the terror of crime. All that is required is that we take away the criminals' rights - which, of course, are our own. Out of our desperation and fear we begin to feel a sense of security from the new totalitarian state.

Nothing in the world is as fearsome as a bloody, battered opponent who will never surrender.

I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.

We have become the new american slaves: but there is a revolution coming. It is a revolution of individual liberty. It will free us without violence. It will begin with the self. It will spread to the workplace. It will turn our corporate masters into our servants. It will free us of government's tyranny. The revolution will spread to all corners of the nation, and at last, we shall be free.

Faced with the pain of freedom, man begs for his shackles.

The less of one's life one must exchange for money, the more freedom one may enjoy.

To freely bloom - that is my definition of success.

I could teach an eighth-grader in twenty minutes how to brief a case. Yet for all three years in most law schools the casebook method of learning the law is still in. The matriculating young lawyer is as qualified to represent a client with the education he has suffered through as a doctor who has never seen a patient, who has never held a scalpel in his hand and who learns surgery by having read text books about it and becomes skilled in surgery, if ever, after having stacked up piles of corpses who represent his pathetic learning process.

Our prejudices - we all have them - are part of our personality structure. The problem is that our prejudices may lie lurking at the bottom of the subterranean mind where the slowly ooze up and color our thinking without our knowing it.

The worst enslaving trait of all is greed. I rail against the substitution of money for worth. The idea that the endless accumulation of dead money can furnish a meaningful life to sold-out souls is the supreme lie offered by the system of free enterprise.

There are no rules that say lawyers cannot write or speak from their heart. Passion has never been formally outlawed, although it is a little-known experience among most lawyers and nearly all academicians.

To accept capitalism and Free Enterprise as articles of faith without agreeing that we must be free to consider whether what is offered is free and freeing is itself enslavement.

The ultimate enemy of Democracy is not the drug dealer of the crooked politician or the crazed skinhead. The ultimate enemy is the New King that has become so powerful it can murder its own citizens with impunity.

Today the insatiable quest for profit promotes the new slavery. In bewildering ways, the new is more pernicious than the old, for the New American Slave is told he is free, and he clings to that myth as if his life depended upon it, a suspicion that cannot be totally ignored.

We must begin to train lawyers the minute they walk into law school to tell the truth. They must immediately begin to learn the business of representing people. They must be assigned cases the first day.

How much of our lives could we buy back if we cherished our lives instead of our trinkets?

Words that do not create images should be discarded.

Arguments do not erase prejudice any more than arguments erase scars, whether psychological or physical.

. . . in America, we have achieved the Orwellian prediction - enslaved, the people have been programmed to love their bondage and are left to clutch only mirage-like images of freedom, its fables and fictions. The new slaves are linked together by vast electronic chains of television that imprison not their bodies but their minds. Their desires are programmed, their tastes manipulated, their values set for them.

Why are scientists now using lawyers in laboratory experiments instead of rats? Three reasons: (1) lawyers are more plentiful than rats, (2) there is no danger the scientists will become attached to the lawyers, and (3) there are some things rats just won't do.

There are only two races (and they are not distinguished by color): those who are free and those who are not.

Credibility is what it is ALL about.

We are defined by how we use our power.

To freely bloom that is my definition of success. The question then is, How does arguing with our children advance our goal that our children freely bloom.

Children, as persons, are entitled to the greatest respect. Children are given to us as free-flying souls, but then we clip their wings like we domesticate the wild mallard. Children should become the role-models for us, their parents, for they are coated with the spirit from which they came- out of the ether, clean, innocent, brimming with the delight of life, aware of the beauty of the simplest thing; a snail, a bud.

The gift of self cannot be given to us. It is an incomparable gift that has already been given. We have possessed it from the beginning.

Once slavery in America was not seen as radical. It became, instead, a revolutionary idea that slaves should be freed. When we have lived under a pernicious power long enough, no matter how oppressive, we grow so accustomed to the yoke that its removal seems frightening, even wrong.

Love is how we feel toward those who show us that which is lovable about ourselves.

When we acknowledge the kingdom of the self, we will no longer accept slavery either for ourselves or for others, no matter how it is disguised.

I dream of a time when the people will retake their airways and use them to achieve a voice to rediscover democracy, and to see the divine potential of man.

Although we give lip service to the notion of freedom, we know the government is no longer the servant of the people but, at last has become the people's master. We have stood by like timid sheep while the wolf killed - first the weak, then the strays, then those on the outer edges of the flock, until at last the entire flock belonged to the wolf.

The so-called godly man may be more likely to do serious wrong than a man who deeply questions himself. The 'godly man' often zealously follows religious precepts that, in the end, justify an unjust injury to others, while the questioning man, addressing his own conscience, may have the better chance to consider all the circumstances and come to the just decision.

Each of us has been endowed with the perfect power to be free. Slavery is a state of mind that fails to acknowledge the slave's own power.

I am not as concerned about choosing the right words as I am in letting the words flow naturally.

When you are faced with prejudice, logic and justice are impotent. Still, we may have an obligation to argue directly into the face of the prejudice, even though there is no chance to win.