Gerry Spence > Quotes

“I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.”
― Gerry Spence, How to Argue and Win Every Time: At Home, At Work, In Court, Everywhere, Every Day

“Children, as persons, are entitled to the greatest respect. Children are given to us as free-flying souls, but then we clip their wings like we domesticate the wild mallard. Children should become the role-models for us, their parents, for they are coated with the spirit from which they came- out of the ether, clean, innocent, brimming with the delight of life, aware of the beauty of the simplest thing; a snail, a bud....”
― Gerry Spence, Give Me Liberty: Freeing Ourselves in the Twenty-First Century

“Skepticism, not cleanliness, is next to godliness. Skepticism is the father of freedom. It is like the pry that holds open the door for truth to slip in.”
― Gerry Spence, Seven Simple Steps to Personal Freedom: An Owner's Manual for Life

“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, Give Me Liberty: Freeing Ourselves in the Twenty-First Century

“Love is how we feel toward those who show us that which is lovable about ourselves.”
― Gerry Spence, The Making of a Country Lawyer: An Autobiography

“There are innumerable ways to murder a person, but the most subtle and pernicious of these is to mutilate the soul of the innocent by denying or downgrading their uniqueness and their beauty.”
― Gerry Spence, How to Argue and Win Every Time: At Home, At Work, In Court, Everywhere, Every Day

“The most formidable chains are forged from beliefs. Ah, beliefs! Beliefs tear out the eyes and leave us blind and groping in the dark. If I believe in one proposition, I have become locked behind the door of that belief, and all other doors to learning and freedom, although standing open and waiting for me to enter, are now closed to me. If I believe in one God, one religion, yes, if I believe in God at all, if I have closed my mind to magic, to spirit, to salvation, to the unknown dimension that exist in the firmament, I have plunged my mind into slavery. Test all beliefs. Distrust all beliefs.”
― Gerry Spence, Seven Simple Steps to Personal Freedom: An Owner's Manual for Life

“The old saw that "sticks and stones can break my bones but words will never harm me" does not, in fact, hold true.”
― Gerry Spence, How to Argue and Win Every Time: At Home, At Work, In Court, Everywhere, Every Day

“The way people move
is their autobiography in motion.”
― Gerry Spence US Justice Trial Lawyer

“If logic and reason, the hard, cold products of the mind, can be relied upon to deliver justice or produce the truth, how is it that these brain-heavy judges rarely agree? Five-to-four decisions are the rule, not the exception. Nearly half of the court must be unjust and wrong nearly half of the time. Each decision, whether the majority or minority, exudes logic and reason like the obfuscating ink from a jellyfish, and in language as opaque. The minority could have as easily become the decision of the court. At once we realize that logic, no matter how pretty and neat, that reason, no matter how seemingly profound and deep, does not necessarily produce truth, much less justice. Logic and reason often become but tools used by those in power to deliver their load of injustice to the people. And ultimate truth, if, indeed, it exists, is rarely recognizable in the endless rows of long words that crowd page after page of most judicial regurgitations.”
― Gerry Spence, How to Argue and Win Every Time: At Home, At Work, In Court, Everywhere, Every Day

“Fear is like a pack of dogs – it chases us, and if we try to run or hide from it the dogs will continue our chase until finally, exhausted, we fall and are devoured.”
― Gerry Spence

“The chief reason [Bill] O'Reilly is a conservative is that like all conservatives he offers no solutions for the major issues confronting those he pretends to champion--such as better wages, workable health insurance, education for every deserving child, controls on the corporate thugs that are destroying our earth, an unfettered national voice for the ordinary citizen, reform of the election laws of this country that permitted corporations to own the country and enslave the people.”
― Gerry Spence

“We have been assembled and fabricated into well-behaved students, predictable consumers, and obedient citizens. Most of what is feral has been domesticated. We suffocate in an amorphous glob of sameness. We have learned it is better to conform than to be.”
― Gerry Spence, How to Argue and Win Every Time: At Home, At Work, In Court, Everywhere, Every Day

“The operational word in every competent defense is attack. If you’re explaining and defending, you’re losing.”
― Gerry Spence, Police State: How America's Cops Get Away with Murder

“To excel in the art of domestic argument, one must master the art of losing.”
― Gerry Spence, How to Argue and Win Every Time

“Maturity and death are cousins.”
― Gerry Spence, How to Argue and Win Every Time: At Home, At Work, In Court, Everywhere, Every Day

“Parents must rear their children toward that one day when the child begins to seek his or her freedom, when the insect, whether an ugly moth or a beautiful butterfly, seeks to abandon the cocoon. During the years between infancy and adolescence, the winning argument will have already been made. The winning argument will have been love; the losing argument, discipline. The winning argument will have been respect; the losing argument, manipulation. The winning argument will have been honesty; the losing argument, hypocrisy. The winning argument will have been freedom; the losing argument, control. If the child has been afforded winning arguments during the child's lifetime, there is little against which the adolescent can revolt. The child will spring forth into the world with joy, not hate; with respect and love, not fury and violence. To give to the world a child who is capable of joyously blooming is the gift of the successful parent.”
― Gerry Spence, How to Argue and Win Every Time

“Power is like a pistol with barrels that point in both directions. When one with power pulls the trigger against someone with lesser power, one barrel fires in the direction of the intended victim while the other fires into the person who has pulled the trigger. As a weapon, power has little to offer. It germinates resentment and reaps hatred. It fosters the deep and abiding need for revenge. Power exercised without love releases an adverse Karma that returns to defeat us—where or when we never know. But it will return with all its destructive force, with all its gathered vengeance. Revenge is the bastard child of justice.”
― Gerry Spence, How to Argue and Win Every Time

“I know love is worth the time it takes to find. Think of that when all the world seems made of walk up rooms and hands in empty pockets”
― Gerry Spence, Of Murder and Madness: A True Story

“The German philosopher Hans Vaihinger, in his important but, in America, little-known book, The Philosophy of 'As If,' proposed that in addition to inductive and deductive thought, there exists an original thought form he calls "fictional thinking." Myth, religious allegory, metaphor, aphorisms, indeed, the world of legal fictions and analogy are examples of fictions we use every day in thinking. An ordinary road map is actually fiction, for nothing like the map exists. Yet we can move accurately, assuredly in the real world as a result of our reliance on the fictional representation of the map. An argument that depends upon "fictional thinking," as Vaihinger called it, is the most powerful of all arguments—the parables of Christ, the stories of tribal chieftains, the fairy tales and fables that are the very undergarments of our society. Jorge Luis Borges, who won the Nobel Prize for literature, Gabriel García Márquez, and Joseph Campbell have all made the same argument, that "fictional thinking" is the original form of human thought, that it harkens to our genes.”
― Gerry Spence, How to Argue and Win Every Time

“But they argued out of strength, not weakness, out of conviction, not insecurity. They argued toward the fulfillment of a purpose and in service to mankind.”
― Gerry Spence, How to Argue and Win Every Time

“Early on de Tocqueville correctly observed that this democracy was one in which “men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, ’til each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals.…” (my italics).”
― Gerry Spence, Bloodthirsty Bitches and Pious Pimps of Power: The Rise and Risks of the New Conservative Hate Culture

“Arguing to hear one's own wonderful voice: I know people who use argument merely to hear their own voices. They are noisemakers. These people seem perfectly secure, but they are enchanted with their words, enthralled with their own wisdom, and they are, to be sure, as boring as popcorn without salt. They have, during the course of their lives, made so much noise and filled the air with so much authoritative banality that they have had no time to form an original thought, nor have they given themselves the opportunity to hear and learn anything from listening to anyone else.”
― Gerry Spence, How to Argue and Win Every Time

“Crawling into the skin of the other (empathy). ‘It must be hard to …’ 176”
― Gerry Spence, How to Argue and Win Every Time: At Home, At Work, In Court, Everywhere, Every Day

“Giving up control is often confused with giving up.”
― Gerry Spence, How to Argue and Win Every Time: At Home, At Work, In Court, Everywhere, Every Day

“We are defined by how we use our power.”
― Gerry Spence

“The inability to yield control is often misinterpreted as inability or weakness. Giving up control is often confused with giving up. 223”
― Gerry Spence, How to Argue and Win Every Time: At Home, At Work, In Court, Everywhere, Every Day

“The goal of many educators, albeit unconfessed, is to condition our young, who are perfectly alive with perfect feelings, to become separated from their feelings, to repress them, to deaden them. The scheme of too many parents and too many teachers is to teach these perfect little living creatures the attitudes of the dead and to instill in them the virtue of death, which is, of course, to be perfectly still, as if in the graveyard, perfectly silent, as if in the tomb, for the dead exhibit the most exemplary behavior. The dead never speak up or cause trouble. I say too many teachers and too many parents love the dead more than the living. But death comes soon enough. Death ought not be imposed upon our young before their time.”
― Gerry Spence, How to Argue and Win Every Time

“Words that do not create images should be discarded. Words that have no intrinsic emotional or visual content ought to be avoided. Words that are directed to the sterile intellectual head-place should be abandoned. Use simple words, words that create pictures and action and that generate feeling.”
― Gerry Spence, How to Argue and Win Every Time

“Every triumph is preceded by fear. Fear always initiates the act of breaking free. And why? What is the biological advantage of a trapped psyche? Breaking out, walking freely through the forest, leaving old trails for new ones always entails a certain quantum of risk. Might we not come face to face with the lurking enemy? Might we fail to measure up? Might we not be injured or killed? But both the forest and the enemy are within. Life entails risk. If it were otherwise, one could not bear to live it, for the risks of boredom, of being trapped within the self—the chick dying in the egg—of dying without having lived, are risks far greater than any that lurk in the forest.”
― Gerry Spence, How to Argue and Win Every Time