I believe you keep a lawyer. I have always kept a lawyer, too, though I have
never made anything out of him. It is a service to an author to have a lawyer.
There is something so disagreeable in having a personal contact with a publisher.
So it is better to work through a lawyer--and lose your case.
- Mark Twains Speeches, "Author's Club"
To succeed in other trades, capacity must be shown; in the law, concealment
of it will do.
- Following the Equator
They all laid their heads together like as many lawyers when they are gettin'
ready to prove that a man's heirs ain't got any right to his property.
- Thomas Jefferson
Snodgrass letter, Keokuk Saturday Post, Nov. 1, 1856
Heaven knows insanity was disreputable enough, long ago; but now that the lawyers
have got to cutting every gallows rope and picking every prison lock with it,
it is become a sneaking villainy that ought to hang and keep on hanging its
sudden possessors until evil-doers should conclude that the safest plan was
to never claim to have it until they came by it legitimately. The very calibre
of the people the lawyers most frequently try to save by the insanity subterfuge
ought to laugh the plea out of the courts, one would think.
- "Unburlesquable
Things," The Galaxy Magazine, July 1870
Lawyers are like other people--fools on the average; but it is
easier for an ass to succeed in that trade than any other.
-quoted in Sam Clemens of Hannibal, Dixon Wecter
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