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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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Gerry Spence
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: January 8
Lawyer
Laramie
Wyoming
Gerald Leonard Spence
Given
Cannot
Self
Incomparable
Possessed
Gift
Beginning
Already

More quotes by Gerry Spence

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How much of our lives could we buy back if we cherished our lives instead of our trinkets?
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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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
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I love my life and I am so blessed.
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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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
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Everyone wants to argue. Everyone does. Everyone needs to.
Gerry Spence
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The way people move is their autobiography in motion.
Gerry Spence
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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
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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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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
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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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Faced with the pain of freedom, man begs for his shackles.
Gerry Spence
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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
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I am not as concerned about choosing the right words as I am in letting the words flow naturally.
Gerry Spence
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The true test of liberty is the right to test it, the right to question it, the right to speak to my neighbors, to grab them by the shoulders and look into their eyes and ask, “Are we free?” I have thought that if we are free, the answer cannot hurt us. And if we are not free, must we not hear the answer?
Gerry Spence
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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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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
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We are defined by how we use our power.
Gerry Spence