Gerry Spence Quotes

Power can win the body count but it cannot win this war. Because the enemy is not human. This is a war against a malicious spirit. Only fools attempt to defeat a spirit with guns and rockets and bombs.

The function of the law is not to provide justice or to preserve freedom. The function of the law is to keep those who hold power, in power.

Crawling into the skin of the other (empathy). ‘It must be hard to …’ 176

Maturity and death are cousins.

To excel in the art of domestic argument, one must master the art of losing.

The Internet has become the phenomenon of the new century. It 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. It creates neighbors where once we were foreigners. It carries our individual voices to new communities formed through the magic of electronics. The electronic village has been born, and the village voice, via the internet is being heard.

Who can we cast into the role of the villain? _Circumstance_ is the villain, is it not? 208

The inability to yield control is often misinterpreted as inability or weakness. Giving up control is often confused with giving up. 223

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.

I dream of a time when the people will retake their airways and use them to achieve a voice to rediscover democracy, and to see the divine potential of man.

As we drive down the freeways, we see the new cars, but not the massive new-car loans that enslave their drivers to the banks.

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....

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

We do not grow much from joy and pleasure, and we do not learn much from winning. We grow and bloom from our pain and from the lessons of the self that we learn from our pain.

Humans, like the simplest organism, take whatever steps that may be available to avoid pain. Sometimes we deny its existence, bury it. The purpose here is not to set out some easy panacea for mental health. I am merely suggesting that to become aware, to become open to ourselves is the first step toward becoming a person and learning how, in the end, to become open to others. It is that magic that begins to build the powerful horse we need to win.

The power argument is an argument so powerful in its structure, so compelling in its delivery that when we assume the power stance the argument cannot be defeated. The power argument need not fill the air with noise. It need not create pandemonium. It need not destroy the opponent. It can be quiet. Gentle. It can embrace love, not anger, understanding, not hate.