Leadership Quote by George Savile

Savile’s line lands like a polite knife: it sounds like a joke about lawyers, but it’s really a theory of power. By giving “the laws” a voice, he stages legislation as something meant to be intelligible, stable, even self-evident. Then he introduces the parasite: the professional class that translates, stretches, and strategically “interprets” those laws until they stop feeling like a public instrument and start behaving like private property.

The subtext isn’t anti-intellectualism; it’s anti-gatekeeping. In 18th-century Britain, law was notoriously procedural, expensive, and riddled with technicalities. That complexity didn’t just happen. It created dependence. If ordinary people can’t navigate the rules that govern them without paying a specialist, the law stops being a civic framework and becomes an industry. Savile, as a politician, is also slipping in a warning to his own peers: when lawmakers outsource moral clarity to legal craftsmanship, they invite a culture where winning matters more than justice, and where meaning is something you litigate rather than agree on.

The craft of the sentence matters. “If” frames it as hypothetical, letting Savile sound reasonable while delivering a broad indictment. “Complain” is mild, almost genteel, which sharpens the satire; the understatement implies the grievance is constant and justified. The punchline is that the law’s alleged protectors are its chief irritants - not because advocacy is inherently corrupt, but because a system that requires perpetual interpretation has already conceded that plain accountability isn’t the point.