Mark Baker Quotes

War strips away the thin veneer applied slap-dash by the institutions of society and shows Man for exactly what he is.

The Dream by Mark Baker

A man lay on his bed at the end of his life waiting to die.
His dream came to pay his last respects
and bid farewell to the man who had never used it.

As it entered the room the man looked down in shame.
"Why did you not realize me?" the dream asked.
"Because I was afraid," the man said.
"Afraid of what," said the dream.
"I was afraid I would fail."

"But haven't you failed by not attempting to use me?".
"Yes I did, but I always thought there would be tomorrow."
"You Fool!" said the dream" Did it never occur to you
that there was only ever today? the moment that you are in right now?

Do you think that now that death is here
that you can put it off until tomorrow?".
"No", said the man, a tear gently rolling down his cheek.
The dream was softer now, because it knew that there were two types of pain,
the pain of discipline and the pain of regret,
and while discipline weighs ounces, regret weighs pounds.

Then the dream leant forward to gently wipe away the tear and said,
" You need only have taken the first step
and I would have taken one to meet you,
for the only thing that ever separated us
was the belief in your mind that you couldn't have me".

Then they said goodbye and they both died.

It's kind of funny to me listening to people who claim to have these great records of winning a hundred and some odd straight felony cases without a loss and that kind of stuff that you hear of all the time. I'm here to tell you, if you let me pick out which hundred cases I get to try, I'll win a hundred of them in a row, too. Case selection is everything in creating records like that. My philosophy was, I tried them all. If I made a determination that the evidence was sufficient to justify the prosecution, then I would try the case, and certainly whenever you do that, you're going to lose a certain percentage of them.

I'm amazed at how [police officers] don't want to come to court. They want to make the case and they want it to get prosecuted, but they don't want to come testify. Sorry, but the ultimate way of writing your report is telling it to a jury. When I was a defense lawyer, I used to think all police officers were liars, but now I find that there are only a few. Most of them are pretty straightforward and do a good job. But there are some, and if I know that they are liars or I know they tend to exaggerate, I try to take that into consideration when I'm dealing with their cases.