Gerry Spence Quotes - Page 2

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.

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

We are defined by how we use our power.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

We could advance the human race enormously if we but learned to communicate honestly with our neighbors.

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

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

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.

The way people move is their autobiography in motion.

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

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.