Life & Wisdom Quote by Gerald F. Lieberman

The line lands like a polite defense of lawyers, then quietly flips into a joke at their expense. Lieberman’s intent isn’t to rehabilitate the profession so much as to stage a miniature courtroom drama in a single sentence: “unfair” and “believe everything” sound like the language of due process, but the punchline concedes that the only real problem with anti-lawyer stereotypes is their occasional inaccuracy. Not their malice. Not their cynicism. Just their statistical reliability.

That’s where the subtext bites. The quote performs fairness while withholding sympathy. “Some of it might not be true” is an almost comically low bar, implying that the rest of the accusations probably are. Lieberman also exploits how we talk about lawyers as a cultural shorthand for mistrust: people who profit from complexity, loopholes, and persuasion. Even the mildness of “might” carries a shrugging fatalism, as if truth is a technicality and reputations are decided by vibes.

Context matters because lawyer jokes aren’t random; they’re an outlet for resentment toward institutions that feel expensive, opaque, and adversarial. The humor works by pretending to correct prejudice while actually confirming it, letting the audience feel both principled and delightedly petty. It’s a neat rhetorical trick: the sentence gestures at justice, then convicts anyway.