Quotes About Criminal Defense

#1. I tell my students, if you ever become comfortable with your role as criminal defense lawyer, it's time to quit. It should be a constant source of discomfort, because you're dealing with incredible moral ambiguity, and you've been cast into a role which is not enviable.

Alan Dershowitz

#2. Criminal defense really isn't so different from proctology. In both fields, it's one asshole after another.

Emma Chase

#3. I did criminal defense work part-time, and that paid the bills for representing abused and neglected children ... and for defending in juvenile court those kids the 'child protective system' had missed when it had the chance.

Andrew Vachss

#4. I'm an appellate criminal defense attorney. I'm used to losing.

Vanessa Place

#5. Lawyers claim that their clients have been grossly mistreated, which is what criminal defense lawyers are paid to do.

Ken Starr

#6. There is no client as scary as an innocent man.
J. Michael Haller, Criminal Defense Attorney, Los Angeles, 1962.

Michael Connelly

#7. One of the people that wrote a forward to my book is Gerry Spence, whom I admire. Gerry is a friend of mine, and Gerry's perhaps the leading criminal defense attorney in the country.

Vincent Bugliosi

#8. To be an effective criminal defense counsel, an attorney must be prepared to be demanding, outrageous, irreverent, blasphemous, a rogue, a renegade, and a hated, isolated, and lonely person - few love a spokesman for the despised and the damned.

Clarence Darrow

#9. My anti-authoritarian instincts let me directly to criminal defense work.

Lynne Stewart

#10. So swift, silent and furtive were his movements like those of a trained bloodhound picking out a scent, that I could not but think what a terrible criminal he would have made had he turned his energy and sagacity against the law instead of exerting them in its defense.

Arthur Conan Doyle

#11. Believe me, it is a great deal better to find cast-iron proof that you're innocent than to languish in a cell hoping that the police
who already think you're guilty
will find it for you.

Douglas Adams

#12. The ONE thing that is most certain in life is CHANGE ;)

Michael

#13. In other words, a gun is twenty-two times more likely to be used in a criminal assault, an accidental death or injury, a suicide attempt, or a homicide than it is for self-defense.67

Michael Shermer

#14. Our senses are fairies who work the miracle of changing that movement into noise, and by that metamorphosis give birth to music, which makes the mute agitation of nature a harmony

Guy De Maupassant

#15. As I've said, freedom is really an illusion. Anytime we think we have a real choice, it just means we haven't seen the shotgun aimed at our navel.

Jeff Lindsay

#16. Clarabelle laughed like she'd just heard the funniest thing ever. Of course you HOPE you won't die, Valkyrie! Who would HOPE to die? That's just SILLY! But you probably WILL die, that's what I'm saying. Don't you think so?

Derek Landy

#17. Libertarianism holds that the only proper role of violence is to defend person and property against violence, that any use of violence that goes beyond such just defense is itself aggressive, unjust, and criminal

Murray N. Rothbard

#18. Providing adequate representation even for defendants who appear guilty is the best way to protect those who are not.

Deborah L. Rhode

#19. One of the most corrosive aspects of the criminal justice system is its toleration of the insanity defense...Legitimate in some few cases, the insanity defense has been rendered farcical through its manipulation by so-called experts.

Robert K. Tanenbaum

#20. It is perhaps true that the criminal who embraces a holy cause is more ready to risk his life and go to extremes in its defense than people who are awed by the sanctity of life and property.

Eric Hoffer

#21. I think our lives are surely but the dreams
Of spirits, dwelling in the distant spheres,
Who as we die, do one by one awake.

Edgar Saltus

#22. Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.

Victor Hugo

#23. There are opportunities that I have because I'm a white dude, and it's controversial because that's just the way that the world we live in kind of is.

Diplo

#24. I know what I heard, Ms. Polanski," he said firmly, those lovely lips of his thinning with discontent. "You won't admit it, but I heard you think the word vampire." "Maybe that's because you're just like one, Detective. Because as of right now, you're sucking the life out of me.

Dakota Cassidy

#25. You have to be adroit and also patient to make others agree to your terms.

Mohith Agadi

#26. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

Hannah Arendt

#27. Love, it has been said, flows downward. The love of parents for their children has always been far more powerful than that of children for their parents; and who among the sons of men ever loved God with a thousandth part of the love which God has manifested to us?

Augustus Hare

#28. They're all the same
the cop, the criminal, the defense, the prosecutor
they all share a fundamental belief in the malleability of truth

Louise Erdrich

#29. Our nation was built and civilized by men and women who used guns in self-defense and in pursuit of peace. One wonders indeed, if the rising crime rate, isn't due as much as anything to the criminal's instinctive knowledge that the average victim no longer has means of self-protection.

Ronald Reagan

#30. All art is concerned with coming into being; for it is concerned neither with things that are, or come into being by necessity, nor with things that do so in accordance with nature.

Aristotle.