Legally Speaking

"Every lawyer carries within him the debris of a poet."
Gustave Flaubert in Madame Bovary

"Every lawyer carries within him the debris of a poet."
    Gustave Flaubert
    Madame Bovary

"The good lawyer is not the man who has an eye to every
side and angle of contingency, and qualifies all his
qualifications, but who throws himself on your part so
heartily, that he can get you out of a scrape."
    Ralph Waldo Emerson

"A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere
working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of
these, he may venture to call himself an architect."
Sir Walter Scott

"The power of clear statement is the great power
at the bar."
 Daniel Webster

"Liberty of speech inviteth and provoketh liberty to be
used again, and so bringeth much to a man's knowledge."
    Francis Bacon
    The Advancement of Learning - 1605

"The security of the Nation is not at the ramparts alone.  
Security also lies in the value of our free institutions.  A
cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous
press must be suffered by those in authority in order to
preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression
and the right of the people to know."
    U.S.D.J. Murray Gurfein
    U. S. v. New York Times Co.,
    328 F. Supp. 324 (S.D.N.Y. 1974)

"Certainly the First Amendment's language leaves no room
for inference that abridgments of speech and press can be
made just because they are slight. That Amendment
provides, in simple words, that 'Congress shall make no
law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.' 
I read 'no law . . . abridging' to mean no law abridging."
    Justice Hugo Black
    Smith v. California,
    361 U.S. 147 (1959)(concurring)

"A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who
has the better lawyer."
    Robert Frost

"Lawyers are necessary in a community. Some of you ... 
take a different view; but as I am a member of that legal
profession, or was at one time, and have only lost
standing in it to become a politician, I still retain the pride
of the profession. And I still insist that it is the law and the
lawyer that make popular government under a written
constitution and written statutes possible."
    William Howard Taft
    Presidential address, November 4, 1909

"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of
material I understand to be embraced within that
shorthand description [of hard-core pornography], and
perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I
know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in
this case is not that."
    Justice Potter Stewart
    Jacobellis v. Ohio,
    378 U.S. 184 (1964)(emphasis added)
 

"The Freedom of Information Act: 'a federal regulation
obliging government agencies to release all information
they had to anyone who made application for it, except
information they had that they did not want to release.'"
    Joseph Heller
    Closing Time (1994)

"The law hath not been dead, though it hath slept."
    William Shakespeare
    Measure for Measure, II, ii.

"And do as adversaries do in law,
Strive mightily, but eat and drink as friends."
    William Shakespeare
    The Taming of the Shrew, I, ii

"Why may not that be the skull of a lawyer? Where be his
quiddets now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures, and his
tricks? Why does he suffer this rude knave, now, to knock
him about the sconce with a dirty shovel, and will not tell
him of his action of battery? Humph! This fellow might be
in's time a buyer of land, with his statutes, his
recognizances, his fines, his double vouchers, his
recoveries. Is this the fine of his fines, and the recovery of
his recoveries, to have his fine pate full of fine dirt? Will
his vouchers vouch him no more of his purchases, and
double ones, too, than the length and breadth of a pair of
indentures? The very conveyance of his lands will hardly lie
in this box; and must the inheritor himself have no more?"
    William Shakespeare
    Hamlet, V, i

"You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, 
at long last?  Have you left no sense of decency?
    Boston lawyer Joseph N. Welch
    To Senator Joseph McCarthy,
    Army-McCarthy Hearings, June 9, 1954

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the
death your right to say it."
     Voltaire (attributed)

"The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it
strictly."
    Abraham Lincoln

"The right to be alone--the most comprehensive of rights, 
and the right most valued by civilized men."
    Justice Louis D. Brandeis
    Olmstead v. United States,
    277 U.S. 438 (1928)

"The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning
of all freedom."
    Justice William O. Douglas
    Public Utilities Comm'n v. Pollak,
    343 U.S. 451, 467 (1952)