Daily Inspiration Quote by Florynce R. Kennedy

Kennedy turns a tired question about professional sameness into a controlled insult: if you want to know whether all lawyers are alike, first decide what you think a sewer is for. The line works because it smuggles in its verdict through analogy. She doesn’t argue that lawyers are garbage; she makes you feel how quickly a respectable category can be reclassified when you change the frame. The sewer image is visceral, municipal, unavoidable. It’s where a city hides what it can’t glamorize. By pairing “lawyers” with “sewer” she suggests the legal system’s proximity to society’s refuse - not just crime, but hypocrisy, corruption, and the quiet disposal of inconvenient people and problems.

As a lawyer herself, Kennedy’s barb is also strategic self-positioning. She’s not an outsider throwing rocks; she’s speaking as someone who knows the pipes. That matters given her public role as a radical feminist and civil rights attorney: she spent her career watching law launder power while claiming neutrality. The subtext is less “all lawyers are bad” than “the institution invites a certain kind of moral compromise.” Sewers don’t care what flows through them; they’re engineered to move it along. In that sense, the jab lands on professional incentives: billing structures, adversarial duty, careerism, the soothing fiction that procedure equals justice.

The punchline’s sting comes from its false innocence. “The question arises” sounds like committee language, then the metaphor drops like a manhole cover. Kennedy’s intent is to puncture reverence for the profession, and to force listeners to confront how easily “respectable work” becomes sanitation for the powerful.