Gerry Spence Quotes

Power is lonely. Power segregates. God must be the most lonely entity in the universe. No person is more lonely than a judge. No person needs a friend more. The boss was once a worker with many friends. Now he exists apart from them. He is lonely. Some of his old friends hate him. Others fear him. The parent is always separated from the child. Parents and children can be friendly. They can love each other. But rarely can they be friends, for they are never peers, which is the foundation of all friendships. Power, real or imagined, physical or psychological, isolates.

Great pretenses win nothing. The tears, the unctuous oratory — all are useless if, at last, we have no credibility. To win, we must be believed. To be believed, we must be believable. To be believable, we must tell the truth, the truth about ourselves — the whole truth.

Ten elements that make up the great power argument.
1. Prepare, Prepare until we have become the argument.
2. Open the Other to receive your argument.
3. Give the argument in the form of a story.
4. Tell the truth.
5. Tell the other what you want.
6. Avoid sarcasm, scorn, and ridicule. Use humor cautiously.
7. Logic is power.
8. Action and winning are [siblings.]
9. Admit at the outset the weakest point in your argument.
10. Understand your power. Give yourself permission — only to win.
Take the winning stance. Turn on the Magical Argument. Open up and let the magic out. Trust it. Take the risk. Jump.

It is clear that we require power. But the power we need is our own. The power exhibited in the winning argument may not be overtly powerful at all, for power may be experienced as gentleness, as compassion, as love, as humility, as sensitivity. We have come to understand that even sounds we thought powerful — the harsh voice of authority, the demanding dictates of the bully — are not sounds of power but the wretched noise of the insecure. We have come to understand that the application of excessive power often conceals cowardice or grave personality defects, that power is often useless to achieve what we want — to gain love or respect or success. And we have learned that power is deceptive, that at times there is no one more powerful than the powerless. So it has been throughout history. The Rockys have always been more powerful than the Apollo Creeds. The meek, unsullied by power, shall indeed inherit the earth.

Yet I made the purchase, captivated by the ring of truth, by the simple winning argument of the old man who told us plainly what he wanted.

How strange, I thought, that we are able to argue so well against ourselves but so ineffectively _for_ ourselves.

After black slavery, the worker, black and white, became the new slave who was left to fend for himself, to feed and educate his children, and to see to his own burial. At the beginning of the Industrial Age the workingman was transformed into another commodity, an item of energy that could be converted to money. Nothing has changed.

Every triumph is preceded by fear. Fear always initiates the act of breaking free. And why? What is the biological advantage of a trapped psyche? Breaking out, walking freely through the forest, leaving old trails for new ones always entails a certain quantum of risk. Might we not come face to face with the lurking enemy? Might we fail to measure up? Might we not be injured or killed? But both the forest and the enemy are within. Life entails risk. If it were otherwise, one could not bear to live it, for the risks of boredom, of being trapped within the self — the chick dying in the egg — of dying without having lived, are risks far greater than any that lurk in the forest.

Words that do not create images should be discarded. Words that have no intrinsic emotional or visual content ought to be avoided. Words that are directed to the sterile intellectual head-place should be abandoned. Use simple words, words that create pictures and action and that generate feeling.

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.

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

We are defined by how we use our power.

Giving up control is often confused with giving up.

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

Arguing to hear one's own wonderful voice: I know people who use argument merely to hear their own voices. They are noisemakers. These people seem perfectly secure, but they are enchanted with their words, enthralled with their own wisdom, and they are, to be sure, as boring as popcorn without salt. They have, during the course of their lives, made so much noise and filled the air with so much authoritative banality that they have had no time to form an original thought, nor have they given themselves the opportunity to hear and learn anything from listening to anyone else.