Witty One-Liners Quote by David Mellor

Mellor’s jab works because it borrows the authority of the animal metaphor without pretending to be fair. A rhinoceros is a blunt instrument: impressive, hard to hurt, and famously ill-suited to subtle navigation. By mapping that onto lawyers, the line compresses a whole cultural grievance into three traits that feel instantly legible: “thick skinned” (immune to shame), “short-sighted” (tunnel vision in service of winning), and “always ready to charge” (defaulting to aggression when challenged).

The intent isn’t to describe actual legal practice so much as to satirize how it feels to deal with the profession from the outside. The joke targets the transactional posture people associate with law: argument as sport, conflict as currency. “Charge” lands as a double entendre, too, smuggling in the suspicion that lawyers don’t just attack; they invoice. That little extra sting is what turns a generic insult into a memorable line.

Subtextually, it’s also about power asymmetry. A rhino doesn’t negotiate; it barrels through. The speaker positions themself as the vulnerable party in the encounter, someone who experiences legal expertise less as protection and more as impact. Context matters: Mellor is a British political figure, and in UK public life “lawyers” often stand in for a broader frustration with proceduralism, rights talk, and the sense that technicalities can override common sense. The quip flatters the audience’s feeling that they’re being steamrolled by people who know the rules better than they know the world.