Daily Inspiration Quote by Jacques Verges

Verges is doing more than reciting the civics-textbook line about due process; he is laundering his own notoriety into principle. As the lawyer who built a career around defending the indefensible (from Algerian FLN militants to Klaus Barbie), he knows that “everyone has a right to be defended” sounds unassailable until you name the defendant. The quote works because it anticipates that recoil and tries to outflank it with procedural righteousness: not innocence, not sympathy, just the machinery of democracy doing what it claims to do.

The phrasing is pointedly bureaucratic. “My office is to defend him” reduces moral panic to job description. “Discuss the accusation point by point” signals the courtroom as a place where the state must earn its conclusions, not simply announce them. That’s also Verges’s sly provocation: in high-stakes political trials, the “accusation” is rarely just legal. It’s a narrative about who counts as human, who counts as citizen, whose violence is called crime versus history.

Subtextually, Verges is policing the boundary between legitimacy and vengeance. He frames defense work as a “normal step in a democracy,” implying that the true scandal isn’t the defendant’s alleged acts but a public that wants shortcuts when it’s angry or afraid. Coming from him, it’s also self-justification: a way to claim he’s not endorsing clients’ deeds while still exploiting their symbolic charge. The line invites a hard question modern democracies keep dodging: if rights are conditional on likability, are they rights at all, or just rewards for good behavior?