H.L. Mencken: Law as "a great devourer of good men"

The sad thing about lawyers is not that so many of them are stupid, but that so many of them are intelligent. The craft is a great devourer of good men; it sucks in and wastes almost as many as the monastic life consumed in the Middle Ages.

  --H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), in  The American Mercury (January 1928, p. 35), fromA Second Mencken Chrestomathy (pub.2006, ed. Terry Teachout