Top 62 Gerry Spence Quotes
#1. As we drive down the freeways, we see the new cars, but not the massive new-car loans that enslave their drivers to the banks.
Gerry Spence
#2. 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.
Gerry Spence
#3. How much of our lives could we buy back if we cherished our lives instead of our trinkets?
Gerry Spence
#4. Everyone wants to argue. Everyone does. Everyone needs to.
Gerry Spence
#5. 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.
Gerry Spence
#6. 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.
Gerry Spence
#8. There are only two races (and they are not distinguished by color): those who are free and those who are not.
Gerry Spence
#9. I am not as concerned about choosing the right words as I am in letting the words flow naturally.
Gerry Spence
#10. Today the courts are choked with lawsuits brought by people against the New King. When they sue each other as a result of an automobile accident they in fact sue the King, for both parties are likely insured ... Steadily the courts have become clearing-houses for the insurance industry.
Gerry Spence
#11. 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.
Gerry Spence
#12. The erosion of a nation's concern for life and for individual rights, has always preceded the intrusion of tyranny.
Gerry Spence
#13. 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.
Gerry Spence
#14. Nothing in the world is as fearsome as a bloody, battered opponent who will never surrender.
Gerry Spence
#15. 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.
Gerry Spence
#16. 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.
Gerry Spence
#17. 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.
Gerry Spence
#18. Words that do not create images should be discarded.
Gerry Spence
#19. What the insurance companies have done is to reverse the business so that the public at large insures the insurance companies.
Gerry Spence
#20. 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.
Gerry Spence
#21. 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.
Gerry Spence
#22. 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.
Gerry Spence
#23. 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.
Gerry Spence
#25. To freely bloom - that is my definition of success.
Gerry Spence
#26. Successful argument is a communication between the acknowledged authority of both parties to the argument.
Gerry Spence
#27. 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.
Gerry Spence
#28. Faced with the pain of freedom, man begs for his shackles.
Gerry Spence
#29. 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.
Gerry Spence
#30. Is there anyone I wouldn't take as a client? Well, I'd never represent a banker.
Gerry Spence
#31. The old saw that "sticks and stones can break my bones but words will never harm me" does not, in fact, hold true.
Gerry Spence
#32. 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.
Gerry Spence
#33. 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.
Gerry Spence
#35. 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.
Gerry Spence
#36. Our willingness to openly reveal our feelings in our argument nearly always builds our credibility.
Gerry Spence
#37. 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.
Gerry Spence
#38. The stain of prejudice is often indelible.
Gerry Spence
#39. 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.
Gerry Spence
#40. My intent is to tell the truth as I know it, realizing that what is true for me may be blasphemy for others.
Gerry Spence
#41. 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.
Gerry Spence
#42. In any nation in which people's rights have been subordinated to the rights of the few, in any totalitarian nation, the first institution to be dismantled is the jury. I was, I am, afraid.
Gerry Spence
#43. 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.
Gerry Spence
#44. Arguments do not erase prejudice any more than arguments erase scars, whether psychological or physical.
Gerry Spence
#45. The less of one's life one must exchange for money, the more freedom one may enjoy.
Gerry Spence
#46. I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.
Gerry Spence
#47. Prejudice locks the mind. Nothing can enter. Nothing true can escape.
Gerry Spence
#48. Love is how we feel toward those who show us that which is lovable about ourselves.
Gerry Spence
#49. It is an anomaly that we can split the atom, but we are nearly powerless to persuade each other to embrace justice.
Gerry Spence
#50. To excel in the art of domestic argument, one must master the art of losing.
Gerry Spence
#51. The operational word in every competent defense is attack. If you're explaining and defending, you're losing.
Gerry Spence
#52. To bargain freedom for security is the devil's bargain. Having made the bargain, one enjoys neither freedom nor security.
Gerry Spence
#54. There are innumerable ways to murder a person, but the most subtle and pernicious of these is to mutilate the soul of the innocent by denying or downgrading their uniqueness and their beauty.
Gerry Spence
#55. Money in doses disproportionate to our needs enslaves.
Gerry Spence
#56. 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.
Gerry Spence
#57. I know love is worth the time it takes to find. Think of that when all the world seems made of walk up rooms and hands in empty pockets
Gerry Spence
#58. 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.
Gerry Spence
#59. 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.
Gerry Spence
#60. We are afraid. But fear confirms life and identifies the source of every successful argument - ourselves.
Gerry Spence
#61. 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.
Gerry Spence
#62. 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.
Gerry Spence
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