Lawyer even sounds like liar.

"Lawyers are alright, I guess — but it doesn't appeal to me", I said. "I mean they're alright if they go around saving innocent guys' lives all the time, and like that, but you don't do that kind of stuff if you're a lawyer. All you do is make a lot of dough and play golf and play bridge and buy cars and drink Martinis and look like a hot-shot. And besides, even if you did go around saving guys' lives and all, how would you know if you did it because you really wanted to save guys' lives, or because you did it because what you really wanted to do was be a terrific lawyer, with everybody slapping you on the back and congratulating you in court when the goddam trial was over, the reporters and everybody, the way it is in the dirty movies? How would you know you weren't being a phony? The trouble is you wouldn't."

The public regards lawyers with great distrust. They think lawyers are smarter than the average guy but use their intelligence deviously. Well, they're wrong. Usually they are not smarter.

There is a vague popular belief that lawyers are necessarily dishonest. I say vague, because when we consider to what extent confidence and honors are reposed in and conferred upon lawyers by the people, it appears improbable that their impression of dishonesty is very distinct and vivid. Yet the impression is common, almost universal. Let no young man choosing the law for a calling for a moment yield to the popular belief — resolve to be honest at all events; and if in your own judgment you cannot be an honest lawyer, resolve to be honest without being a lawyer. Choose some other occupation, rather than one in the choosing of which you do, in advance, consent to be a knave.

So when all the yielding and objections is over, the other Senator said, "I object to the remarks of a professional joker being put into the Congressional Record." Taking a dig at me, see? They didn't want any outside fellow contributing. Well, he had me wrong. Compared to them I'm an amateur, and the thing about my jokes is that they don't hurt anybody. You can say they're not funny or they're terrible or they're good or whatever it is, but they don't do no harm. But with Congress — every time they make a joke it's a law. And every time they make a law it's a joke.

Lawyers have never been popular. It will be remembered that although there is at least one lawyer in most of the Dickens novels, few of them are drawn as attractive personalities.

God, I sound like an ass. Worse yet, I sound like a lawyer.

Apologists for the profession contend that lawyers are as honest as other men, but this is not very encouraging.

My lawyer ate my vanity card.

Not all lawyers are annoying. Some are dead.

Practical jokes are a demonstration that the distinction between seriousness and play is not a law of nature but a social convention which can be broken, and that a man does not always require a serious motive for deceiving another.

Two men, dressed as city employees, block off a busy street and start digging it up. The traffic cop, motorists and pedestrians assume that this familiar scene has a practical explanation – a water main or an electric cable is being repaired – and make no attempt to use the street. In fact, however, the two diggers are private citizens in disguise who have no business there.

All practical jokes are anti-social acts, but this does not necessarily mean that all practical jokes are immoral. A moral practical joke exposes some flaw of society which is hindrance to a real community or brotherhood. That it should be possible for two private individuals to dig up a street without being stopped is a just criticism of the impersonal life of a large city where most people are strangers to each other, not brothers; in a village where all inhabitants know each other personally, the deception would be impossible.

BE A LAWYER in a lawless time was like being a clown among the humorless: which was to say, either completely redundant or absolutely essential.

Whether you serve ultimately as a lawyer or judge, I hope as an officer of the court all the same you will help explain these virtues to your clients, your family, and your friends. In popular culture, we often see people deriding judges who issue unpopular rulings or lawyers who represent unpopular clients. We see those who confuse a judge's ruling or a lawyer's representation with support for the person's cause or personal favoritism or bias. They suggest that when a judge rules for a corporation, he loves corporations. Or that when a lawyer represents a criminal defendant, he loves criminals.
Attacks like these miss the mark. They misunderstand completely the role of judge and lawyer. I hope you will help remind those you encounter that if they want to secure their own liberty from oppression, they should want lawyers and judges who are unafraid to follow the law where it leads and enforce the law fearlessly, without bending to the passing whims and wishes of public opinion. For one day, too, you might remind your friends, they could find themselves braced against the prevailing winds of the day, in need of a lawyer and facing a judge. And when that day comes, I hope you will ask them, would they rather stand before a court of public opinion or a court of law?

For his confused and wayward wit </br> Like to a greedy lawyer is, </br> Who laws doth make to suit the taste </br> Of those who do his counsel seek.