Alberto Gonzales Quotes

… the comfortable fiction that all lawyers are skilled or even competent craftsmen in representing the fundamental rights of their clients.

The attorney doesn't decide what to do; the client ultimately decides what to do.

Like any good lawyer, I'm going to maintain a confidentiality of advice offered in confidence.

I couldn't do that as attorney general. Why? Because they are my clients. You can't say they're not doing what they ought to be doing when you are the attorney general.

For me, being a lawyer means to help those in need.

I think that the question is very clear-cut, not only as a matter of ethics, but also as a matter of law, that a lawyer should not be aiding and abetting in a fraudulent scheme, and part of that aiding and abetting would be to draw up subsequent documents in order to conceal the true nature of the scheme from federal investigators.

When you have an attorney giving you advice, it would be nice to know what their financial relationship is to the advice.

I'm a trained lawyer, after all, so I don't have to admit to anything.

Lawyers claim that their clients have been grossly mistreated, which is what criminal defense lawyers are paid to do.

We're talking about the lawyers for the United States of America. And I think it's very, very important that the lawyers be comfortable being very candid and open about their views on very sensitive issues affecting the United States.

Lawyers have to make a living, and can only do so by inducing people to believe that a straight line is crooked.

For me, I don't participate in the filming when I represent a reality show star in a case, because that would mean waiving my right to attorney-client privilege, and that would hamper my ability to mount an effective case.

It may be stated as a general principal, that public policy forbids the maintenance of any suit in a court of justice, the trial of which would inevitably lead to the disclosure of matters which the law itself regards as confidential.

Public policy forbids the maintenance of any suit in a court of justice, the trial of which would inevitably lead to the disclosure of matters which the law itself regards as confidential, and respecting which it will not allow the confidence to be violated. On this principle, suits cannot be maintained which would require a disclosure of the confidences of the confessional, or those between husband and wife, or of communications by a client to his counsel for professional advice, or of a patient to his physician for a similar purpose. Much greater reason exists for the application of the principle to cases of contract for secret services with the government.

When the law says you're entitled to an attorney, it doesn't mean you're entitled to an attorney who sleeps or an attorney who doesn't do his job.

One lawyer will make work for another.

By God, we’ve got to get rid of the lawyers.

I've been in several situations where police officers and district attorneys have had the cooperation of people in the news media without either endangering the reporter or compromising their sources.

Lawyers are very important people to me.

I think, clearly, where you have a situation in which the Solicitor General tells me, 'I cannot in good faith argue a certainly legal position,' and if the president told us to argue that position, we would have to tell him, 'No, we can't do that, Mr. President.'

It takes a lot of money to hire an attorney.

We're trying to make sure that financial advisers act like lawyers and doctors. When you go to a lawyer or doctor, they have an obligation to put your best interests first. Financial advisers don't.

I fire lawyers frequently.

One of the things about being a law student is that the academic discipline of law is very often removed from the practical reality of law. How to complain, who to complain to, and whether or not you even need to invoke the law is very different in the real world from how it's examined in the lecture theatre.

Get a good lawyer because sometimes it's hard to understand what you might or might not be agreeing to.