61 Gerry Spence Quotes

Gerry Spence quotes

1. We are defined by how we use our power.

2. To freely bloom- that is my definition of success.

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

4. PREJUDICE

5. HEART ZONE

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

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. Although the ideal of free enterprise could, indeed, lend itself to the uplifting of the human condition, when it is practiced for profit alone, it becomes but a license for the powerful to further enslave the weak.

12. 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.

13. Slavery is a state of mind that fails to acknowledge the slave's own power.

14. Children are persons. They are small persons whose perfect souls have not yet been ground through the meat grinder of slavery.

15. I say, embrace fear as a friend. It is nature's gift to us. It is the best weapon for liberty. ... It permits us to escape or to fight with power beyond our ability.

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

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

18. The new and most powerful union of all will be a union of one -- one man, one woman, one worker with special skills, an inquiring mind, and an independent attitude, his creativity intact, his love of life blooming. The union of one will be peopled by one man or one woman who is alive. Such a person is always sought by the intelligent manager.

19. Money in doses disproportionate to our needs enslaves.

20. 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. ... Ah, the mother whose gift to the world is a person!

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

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

23. We cannot, as a people, remain mute and free.

24. 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.

25. Power can win the body count but it cannot win this war. Because the enemy is not human. This is a war against a malicious spirit. Only fools attempt to defeat a spirit with guns and rockets and bombs.

26. The goal of a free nation is to reveal by example the enlightened possibilities of the human race, not to wield its power of destruction and death over the helpless, the poor, the starving and the war torn masses. The goal of a free nation must be no different outside its borders than within them. In America we do not massacre whole towns because they may be the chosen domicile of a criminal or a conspiracy of criminals. Instead we carefully root out the felons and bring them to justice.

27. 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.

28. 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.

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

30. 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.

31. 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.

32. 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.

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

34. While birds can fly, only humans can argue. Argument is the affirmation of our being. It is the principal instrument of human intercourse. Without argument the species would perish. As a subtle suggestion, it is the means by which we aid another. As a warning, it steers us from danger. As exposition, it teaches. As an expression of creativity, it is the gift of ourselves. As a protest, it struggles for justice. As a reasoned dialogue, it resolves disputes. As an assertion of self, it engenders respect. As an entreaty of love, it expresses our devotion. As a plea, it generates mercy. As charismatic oration it moves multitudes and changes history. We must argue- to help, to warn, to lead, to love, to create, to learn, to enjoy justice, to be.

1. Susan Boggs, a black runaway interviewed in Canada in 1863, said of the religious slave masters: 'Why the man that baptized me had a colored woman tied up in his yard to whip when he got home that very Sunday and her mother . . . was in church hearing him preach. He preached, You must obey your masters and be good servants.- That is the greater part of the sermon, when they preach to the colored folks. . . .'

2. Words that do not create images should be discarded.

3. 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.

4. Everyone wants to argue. Everyone does. Everyone needs to.

5. 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.

6. Credibility is what it is ALL about...

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

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

9. 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.

10. Successful argument is a communication between the acknowledged authority of both parties to the argument.

11. We are afraid. But fear confirms life and identifies the source of every successful argument - ourselves.

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. 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.

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

16. 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.

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

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

19. . . . 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.

20. 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.

21. 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.

22. 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.

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

24. 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.

25. 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.

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

27. 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.