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