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The Great Gatsby
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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

David Boies Quotes

Obviously I’m a lawyer; I like to have cases.

– David Boies

Unlike people of my generation, my children and my grandchildren have grown up living with, knowing, people who were outwardly gay and lesbian. And they have learned that they’re just like us… And when you see that they’re just like us, the rationale for discrimination melts away.

– David Boies

You wouldn’t go to a hospital, you wouldn’t go to a law firm where the doctors and lawyers were not retained on merit: where they all had tenure regardless of competence. Parents feel the same way about schools that they send their children to.

– David Boies

We’re now segregating our schools based on economics; we’re segregating our schools based on where a child’s parents live. And it has the same corrosive effect of destroying people’s opportunity as racial segregation did.

– David Boies

Once I take a case, I’m stuck with it.

– David Boies

But I’d say my best boss was Tom Barr, who was a partner at Cravath, Swain & Moore in the 1960s. It’s because I learned so much from him.

– David Boies

In any profession, whether it’s teachers or doctors or lawyers, the more we say we’re not going to evaluate those people on the merits, I think that’s when the profession goes into decline.

– David Boies

I don’t really believe in moral victories. You can have them when you’re dealing with public opinion, but in litigation, you want to win the case. I want to win.

– David Boies

We’re lawyers. We present the arguments, and the court sorts out the merits.

– David Boies

When you think of Napster, you think of music. But the first thing that struck me was that this was an important case not only for the music industry but for the whole Internet.

– David Boies

Embrace a diversity of ideas. Embrace the fact that you can disagree with people and not be disagreeable. Embrace the fact that you can find common ground – if you disagree on nine out of 10 things, but can find common ground on that 10th, maybe you can make progress. If you can find common ground, you can accomplish great things.

– David Boies

The Audio Home Recording Act directly says that noncommercial copying by consumers is lawful.

– David Boies

I win virtually every case I should win, and I win a number of cases that people think I shouldn’t.

– David Boies

I made a penny for each paper delivered every day, plus 2 cents for Sunday papers. I had 120 customers. For a 10-year-old kid in the 1940s, that was a lot of money.

– David Boies

I was a paper boy, beginning the summer between my fourth-grade and fifth-grade years.

– David Boies

A trial is a powerful vehicle to explain things. It is the most time that anybody spends really thinking about one thing. Unless you are the analyst on the National Security staff that’s assigned to monitor Putin, and that’s all you do, day in and day out, very few people ever spend the time on a single subject that is spent during trial.

– David Boies

It is human nature to favor individuals and institutions who we know or for whom we feel responsible.

– David Boies

Napster’s only alleged liability is for contributory or vicarious infringement. So when Napster’s users engage in noncommercial sharing of music, is that activity copyright infringement? No.

– David Boies

The very purpose of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution is to protect minority rights against majority voters. Every court decision that strikes down discriminatory legislation, including past Supreme Court decisions, affirming the fundamental rights to marry the person you love, overrules a majority decision.

– David Boies

It’s a matter of priorities. Do you want to win, or would you like to sleep? Do you want to win, or would you like to take a day off?

– David Boies

We must bring the rule of law to its full fruition in the United States, and when we do, we will have achieved the goals and rhetoric of our Founding Fathers.

– David Boies

It is easy to be accurate if you have the freedom to be complicated, and it is very easy to be simple if you have the freedom to shade the truth. What’s hard is to be simple and very accurate, and that takes work to figure out what are the simple truths that are going to sustain your case.

– David Boies

Most people are balancing 10 or 20 priorities. I have two. My family and my work.

– David Boies

Here you have a new technology, and if that technology is going to work, you must allow people to provide central indexes of the data. It’s just like a newspaper that publishes classified ads.

– David Boies

You never know when you lose a case whether it was because the facts were against you, or because the judges had already made up their minds, or if you could have done something differently.

– David Boies

While I agree completely that attracting good teachers is difficult, and we need to spend more time doing that – in part by paying them more money – I don’t think there’s any evidence for the idea that somehow tenure attracts good teachers. In fact, I think the evidence is to the contrary.

– David Boies