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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

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Gerry Spence
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: January 8
Lawyer
Laramie
Wyoming
Gerald Leonard Spence
Hold
Justice
Law
Freedom
Keep
Preserve
Power
Preserves
Provide
Function

More quotes by Gerry Spence

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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.
Gerry Spence
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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
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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
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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
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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
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What the insurance companies have done is to reverse the business so that the public at large insures the insurance companies.
Gerry Spence
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It is an anomaly that we can split the atom, but we are nearly powerless to persuade each other to embrace justice.
Gerry Spence
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Money in doses disproportionate to our needs enslaves.
Gerry Spence
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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
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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
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We could advance the human race enormously if we but learned to communicate honestly with our neighbors.
Gerry Spence
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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
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Successful argument is a communication between the acknowledged authority of both parties to the argument.
Gerry Spence
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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
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Faced with the pain of freedom, man begs for his shackles.
Gerry Spence
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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.
Gerry Spence
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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
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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
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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
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Everyone wants to argue. Everyone does. Everyone needs to.
Gerry Spence