Warren E. Burger Quotes

It confers a great reputation, and great distinction to be accompanied by those whom you have defended and saved in the law courts.

Lawyers may reason powerfully, but power settles most issues.

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.

Lawyers belong to the people by birth and interest, and to the aristocracy by habit and taste; they may be looked upon as the connecting link of the two great classes of society.

If the laws could speak for themselves, they would complain of the lawyers.

I was in the courtroom prosecuting violent felonies for well over a decade.

To play a lawyer and have one year of law school under your belt, you sort of know what you're talking about! I'm able to memorize the legal courtroom stuff a lot faster than I would have been able to otherwise.

When I was growing up, so many of the important changes for African-Americans were being made in the United States Supreme Court and were being made by lawyers. I followed the court very intensely and wanted to do that for my life.

There are some lawyers who think of themselves as basically instruments of whoever their clients are, and they pride themselves on their professional craft.

As an attorney, I could be rather flamboyant in court. I did not act as though I were a black man in a white man's court, but as if everyone else - white and black - was a guest in my court. When trying a case, I often made sweeping gestures and used high-flown language.

I will for ever, at all hazards, assert the dignity, independence, and integrity of the English bar; without which, impartial justice, the most valuable part of the English constitution, can have no existence.

Whatever a person's politics, lawyers have to understand that we are, for most people, the gateway for them to have access to the third branch of government.

I am really impressed by lawyers who write books and tell us that they never lost a case. Most lawyers who have never lost a case have not had enough hard cases. But there are very difficult cases out there.

You know, there are only about 10 people in the United States that have ever argued 25 cases before the Supreme Court, this man has won 25 cases before the Supreme Court. He's an overwhelming choice.

I am co-counsel and as co-counsel I have the right to represent myself, speak for myself and conduct myself and my trial by myself in my best interests in order of due process.

Lawyers work hard and, like us, they're human, many of them.

Certainly, when I was a boy, people liked to believe that lawyers were kind of pillars of goodness of the likes of Atticus Finch in 'To Kill a Mockingbird.'

I think he could defend it at a bar association meeting, but not before real people.

Whenever you see me at court, understand that I will aid you without fee or reward ... the written Constitution is my client and the preservation of its protection is the only fee I asked.

Advocacy is in the courtroom—not out in the streets.

A lawyer's either a social engineer or he's a parasite on society.

In representing criminal defendants—especially guilty ones—it is often necessary to take the offensive against the government: to put the government on trial for its misconduct.

One of the reasons I love the law is because I was raised in family - my grandfather was a lawyer, but more importantly, my grandmother was his secretary. And she taught me that lawyers were some of the most civil, most courteous - and in those days, most courtly - people that she knew.

It's one of the roles of a lifetime to be able to play someone like Mr. Cochran who was so influential. People knew about his work in regard to police brutality. He was very much a staple in the community - someone who, if there was trouble, people knew, 'Go get Johnnie Cochran.'

You don't even have to be a lawyer to be on the Supreme Court, which I think is hilarious.