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As told to Jeannette Batz Cooperman
Photograph by Mark Gilliland
Thomas Guilfoil started his law practice in 1941, at what is now Bryan Cave. “There were nine of us,” he says, “and today there are 1,000.” He left the silk-stocking firm to start his own, representing leaders in the black political community, the Bi-State Development Agency, the St. Louis Football Cardinals, the St. Louis Blues and, pro bono, the prisoners in the city jail. “We approached that like it was a corporate takeover,” hegrins. “Took hostile depositions from the mayor and everyone else and won the case.”
There is no conservative intellectualism in America; there is no liberal intellectualism. There are people who have succeeded academically, and each one has a basket of clichés.
The best way to destroy bad thought is to expose it.
We are a censored people no less than if that censorship were imposed by government fiat. A misplaced word, you are out of the Cabinet. An unthinking word, you are off television.
White political leaders no longer know how to meet with blacks because they need that vote so badly in my [Democratic] party that it stops any rational discussion.
Special-interest voters don’t really care what happens to America.
It makes no difference whatsoever who prevails on the issues of abortion or gun control. It will not affect how Americans live. Meanwhile, we have what in my time was unthought of: a united Europe. We have a burgeoning economy all over Asia; China may well become the colossus of this century. And nobody is interested.
There was never any reason for the expansion of Lambert Field. They spent billions of dollars and took 6,000 homes to make an empty airport look emptier.
American Airlines’ treachery doomed us to be a small town.
I reject entirely that the beauty of this Earth is an accident.
I’m not a churchgoer, but I do not deride those who believe. I’ve seen it transform people.
I became a B-17 bombardier. I was by any definition a terrorist. And at least once a week for six decades, I have thought about that.
Once in your life, take an enormous chance.
At 20, what is hard is concealing yourself. At 85, what is hard is looking at yourself and accepting what age has done to you.
Advocacy is becoming a lost art.
Lawyers see more of people than people want them to.
Necessity gives you strength.
The most underrated virtue is bluntness.
I wouldn’t want anyone to take my life as something to draw a lesson from. I think I could have accomplished much, much more than I ever did. I don’t think I made the proper use of my abilities. And that’s failure.
It took me years to realize I had a happy childhood.
We’ve made kids an industry, and we’ve taken their childhood away.
When I was a boy, sex was mysterious and forbidden. It’s better that way.
When you say morality in America, the first thing that occurs to you is sex. There are many moralities.
We have that puritanical streak that goes all the way back to procreation, yet we hallow recreational sex.
When you look at these contrasts in American reaction, you realize we are living in a number of different worlds, most of them of our own making. That’s a pretty good definition of insanity.
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