Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
To try to make men equal by altering social arrangements is like trying to make the cards of equal value by shuffling the pack.
People in the U.S. pay a great deal of money to support their judiciary, and they have an actual right to see how it functions.
Appellate review is not a magic wand and we undermine public confidence in the judicial process when we make it look like it is.
You don't teach morals and ethics and empathy and kindness in the schools. You teach that at home, and children learn by example.
The mutual confidence on which all else depends can be maintained only by an open mind and a brave reliance upon free discussion.
Those who kept their sanity and humanity intact in the face of awful adversity. Heroes named and unnamed, some known only to God.
Why are liberals who want the government to regulate their health care upset that the government wants to regulate their internet?
You can't just lecture the poor that they shouldn't riot or go to extremes. You have to make the means of legal redress available.
I think then, 1st, that the only safety of the South from abolition universal is to be found in an early dissolution of the Union.
A writer judging his own work is like deceived husband - he is frequently the last person to appreciate the true state of affairs.
The spirit of liberty is the spirit of him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned ... .
Life is made up of a series of judgments on insufficient data, and if we waited to run down all our doubts, it would flow past us.
Handbags, I don't at all like them because they occupy my hands. My hands always have to be ready in case I need to slap somebody.
Just to prove that even the silliest idea can be pursued to its illogical conclusion, Legal Realism spawned Critical Legal Studies.
Simplicity of manner is the last attainment. Men are very long afraid of being natural, from the dread of being taken for ordinary.
Teach your daughters, teach your granddaughters, everybody has to have something that they're good at where they can earn a living.
The intelligence community was absolutely uniform and uniformly wrong about the existence of weapons of mass destruction (in Iraq).
Decide promptly, but never give any reasons for your decisions. Your decisions may be right, but your reasons are sure to be wrong.
He who is silent and bows his head dies every time he does so. He who speaks aloud and walks with his head held high dies only once.
The true fisherman approaches the first day of fishing season with all the sense of wonder and awe of a child approaching Christmas.
I left family court for the vagaries of TV and said to myself, 'Judy, what the hell are you thinking?' It seems like only yesterday.
Barring public demand, any person who pursues the presidency out of personal ambition must be suffering from a basic genetic defect.
As the most participatory form of mass speech yet developed, the Internet deserves the highest protection from government intrusion.
Everyone has, inside himself ... what shall I call it? A piece of good news! Everyone is ... a very great, very important character.
The Philippines will have to once and for all abandon its full-spectrum dependence on America as a guarantor of its national security.
I get to do some kind of artwork almost everyday and it just so happens that I can pay the bills and support my family while doing it.
I think there should be no occasion on which it is absolutely, as a point or rule of law, impossible for a man to redeem his character.
Law is not a trade, not briefs, not merchandise, and so the heaven of commercial competition should not vulgarize the legal profession.
Tattooing is historical, cultural and a great form of art but it should always be safe for both the client and the tattoo practitioner.
Those of us who have come to years of discretion and more, must often take to retrospect, and seek to appraise the outcome of our lives.
So we want to free the women of America? You know what would free the women of America? Make men accept responsibility for birth control.
A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few.
The Dalai Lama has taught me that the best way to live life is to try and avoid desire. Desire is really the basic source of unhappiness.
Limitation is not a matter of justice. It is a rule of public policy which has its origin in history and its justification in convenience.
The use of history is to tell us what we are, for at our birth we are nearly empty vessels and we become what our tradition pours into us.
We shall succeed only so far as we continue to undertake “the intolerable labor of thought” — that most distasteful of all our activities.
Most fishermen swiftly learn that it's a pretty good rule never to show a favorite spot to any fisherman you wouldn't trust with your wife.
We really have no definition of mother in our law books. Mother was believed to have been so basic that no definition was deemed necessary.
Thus hope, aided by imagination, makes one man a hero, another a somnambulist, and a third a lunatic; while it renders them all enthusiasts.
I deal with conflicts that irritate people and give them stress, like the dispute over a car payment. I can resolve those cases in a moment.
Media corporations have a civic responsibility not only to prevent fraud and financial abuse, but also to not corrupt or degrade our culture.
For myself it would be most irksome to be ruled by a bevy of Platonic Guardians, even if I knew how to choose them, which I assuredly do not.
A judge who likes every outcome he reaches is very likely a bad judge... stretching for results he prefers rather than those the law demands.
Ours is the job of interpreting the Constitution. And that document isn't some inkblot on which litigants may project their hopes and dreams.
I don't mind getting my hands dirty, and I don't mind getting to the truth of a situation and saying, 'You're right, you're wrong, next case.'
[Y]ou wonder why anyone would make the mistake of calling it the Commerce Clause instead of the 'Hey, you -can-do-whatever-you-feel-like Clause?
Life is not a thing of knowing only--nay, mere knowledge has properly no place at all save as it becomes the handmaiden of feeling and emotions.
There is no fury like that against one who, we fear, may succeed in making us disloyal to beliefs we hold with passion, but have not really won.
Thought itself needs words. It runs on them like a long wire. And if it loses the habit of words, little by little it becomes shapeless, somber.
Cameras should be the norm everywhere. It should be in every courtroom so that the proceedings are taken down and recorded just like stenography.