You should have said: “Quotes not real? Me dislike! Grrrrrrrrr-hrrrrrrrr!” Oh, wait, that’s six words.
Frankly, I think your critics are silly in this thread and helped derail the conversation far more than you could have done. I understood the quote as (poorly executed) satire, but it took me a second, because I generally expect quotes to be, y’know, actually quotes, unless indicated otherwise, as in my use of hypothetical quotes in this comment.
The author of the piece could have solved the ambiguity quite easily by saying, “They might as well have said, “If you can’t afford a lawyer…””
