20th-century Lawyer Quotes

Suicide is an extreme vote of no confidence in a society that doesn't work.

Sharif Abdullah

Modernity, the child of the Enlightenment, failed when it became apparent that the good society cannot be achieved by unaided reason.

We have the know-how in the world to house everyone. We have the resources in the world to house everyone. All that's missing is the WILL to do it.

The solution to racism lies in our ability to see its ubiquity but not to concede its inevitability. It lies in the collective and institutional power to make change, at least as much as with the individual will to change. It also lies in the absolute moral imperative to break the childish, deadly circularity of centuries of blindness to the shimmering brilliance of our common, ordinary humanity.

Patricia J. Williams

Nuremberg taught me that creating a world of tolerance and compassion would be a long and arduous task. And I also learned that if we did not devote ourselves to developing effective world law, the same cruel mentality that made the Holocaust possible might one day destroy the entire human race.

Benjamin B. Ferencz

The privilege against self-incrimination is one of the great landmarks in man's struggle to make himself civilized... The Fifth is a lone sure rock in time of storm... a symbol of the ultimate moral sense of the community, upholding the best in us.

As Nozick acknowledges, a modern state should not feel morally constrained by property holdings which might have had a Lockean pedigree but in fact do not. In this regard it is interesting that one of the main uses of Lockean theory these days is in defending the property rights of indigenous people—where a literal claim is being made about who had first possession of a set of resources and about the need to rectify the injustices that accompanied their subsequent expropriation.

The immortality of great art seems bound up with the inevitable loss of its original surface meaning and its rebirth in the spirit of every new age.

Anton Ehrenzweig

Those who think the information brought out at a criminal trial is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth are fools. Prosecuting or defending a case is nothing more than getting to those people who will talk for your side, who will say what you want said.

Black women survived the rigors of slavery to demand the rights of their race and of their sex. They rose above the most demeaning forms of labor and demanded to be called by their last names. Black women forged humane communities out of rough settlements. They converted the rock of double oppression into a steppings tone.

What can change the world today is the same thing that has changed it in the past-an idea and the service of dedicated, committed individuals to that idea.

Sargent Shriver

A fine artist is one who makes familiar things new and new things familiar.

What we have in this country is the appearance of justice.

Johnnie Cochran

My only master and my only mistress are the facts and objectivity. I have no others.

Vincent Bugliosi

Mr. Libby's story that he was at the tail end of a chain of phone calls, passing on from one reporter what he heard from another, was not true. It was false. He was at the beginning of the chain of the phone calls, the first official to disclose this information outside the government to a reporter. And he lied about it afterward, under oath and repeatedly.

Patrick Fitzgerald

During the Renaissance, women were not allowed to attend art school. Everyone asks, where are the great women painters of the Renaissance?

I'm not a potted plant. I'm here as the lawyer. That's my job.

Brendan Sullivan

One of the least impressive liberties is the liberty to starve. This particular liberty is freely accorded to authors.

Arnold Goodman, Baron Goodman

We design performance measures to cover-up error. They are called benchmarks. We make decisions based on: Will we be found out? Discovered? Identified as the wrongdoer? Do we really want to have to explain this stuff to someone who spent his or her life in sales or marketing?

Prayer is the means by which men communicate with God. Revelation is the means by which God communicates with men.

Marion G. Romney

We gave them 42% of the land. Did we get 42% of peace? Did we even get 20% of peace?

We should stop looking to law to provide the final answer.... Law cannot save us from ourselves.... We have to go out and try to accomplish our goals and resolve disagreements by doing what we think is right. That energy and resourcefulness, not millions of legal cubicles, is what was great about America. Let judgment and personal conviction be important again.

Philip K. Howard

I approached each speech draft as if it might someday appear under Kennedy's name in a collection of the world's great speeches.

Theodore Sorensen

And it's when I'm standing there this morning, in my PJs and a hijab, next to my mum and my dad, kneeling before God, that I feel a strange sense of calm. I feel like nothing can hurt me, and nothing else matters.

Randa Abdel-Fattah

Neither reproaches nor encouragements are able to revive a faith that is waning.

Nathalie Sarraute