Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Louis Stevenson

Stevenson’s line flatters compromise with the language of commerce: “best” and “cheapest” turn moral choice into a cost-benefit calculation. It’s witty because it treats the courtroom not as a temple of justice but as an expensive machine you’d rather not feed. The joke has teeth. A “lawyer” exists because conflicts harden into claims, and claims demand proof, procedure, and punishment. Compromise, by contrast, is preemptive lawyering: it settles the dispute before it becomes a case.

The subtext is less kumbaya than survivalist. Stevenson grew up amid Victorian respectability, where public reputation and private vice often cohabited, and where legal and social sanctions could be ruinous. Calling compromise a “lawyer” implies that the legal system is a last resort, not a moral ideal. It’s also a quiet admission of human mess: people are rarely innocent, merely strategic. In that world, compromise isn’t weakness; it’s a way to manage imperfect motives without inviting institutional violence.

There’s a second, darker reading: compromise “defends” you, but not necessarily the truth. A cheap lawyer gets you out of trouble, not into righteousness. Stevenson’s fiction repeatedly circles divided selves and negotiated identities; this epigram compresses that theme into a single transaction. Compromise becomes the everyday art of avoiding catastrophe, keeping relationships functional, and limiting the damage when principle collides with reality. It works because it refuses romance: it sells peace as practical, not pure.