Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Comment on this quoteShare via Email Print this Page Daily Quotes Archives2004-03-17 Mar 17, 2004Decency, security, and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen... If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.~ Justice Louis D. BrandeisThe constitutional right of free speech has been declared to be the same in peace and war. In peace, too, men may differ widely as to what loyalty to our country demands, and an intolerant majority, swayed by passion or by fear, may be prone in the future, as it has been in the past, to stamp as disloyal opinions with which it disagrees.~ Justice Louis D. BrandeisTo declare that in the administration of criminal law the end justifies the means – to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure conviction of a private criminal – would bring terrible retribution.~ Justice Louis D. Brandeis Mar 16, 2004An unconditional right to say what one pleases about public affairs is what I consider to be the minimum guarantee of the First Amendment.~ Justice Hugo L. BlackThe First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach.~ Justice Hugo L. BlackThe public welfare demands that constitutional cases must be decided according to the terms of the Constitution itself, and not according to judges’ views of fairness, reasonableness, or justice.~ Justice Hugo L. Black Mar 15, 2004The Constitution is what the judges say it is.~ Justice Charles Evans HughesWe are not final because we are infallible, but infallible only because we are final.~ Justice Robert H. JacksonNone of the modes by which a magistrate is appointed, popular election, the accident of the lot, or the accident of birth, affords, as far as we can perceive, much security for his being wiser than any of his neighbours. The chance of his being wiser than all his neighbours together is still smaller.~ Thomas Babington Macaulay Mar 12, 2004There is in all of us a strong disposition to believe that anything lawful is also legitimate. This belief is so widespread that many persons have erroneously held that things are “just” because the law makes them so.~ Frederic BastiatAbsolute justice is achieved by the suppression of all contradiction, therefore it destroys freedom.~ Albert CamusJustice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice? Let us rather call it injustice, but of a sly effective order, based entirely on cruel knowledge of the resistance of the weak, their capacity for pain, humiliation and misery.~ Georges Bernanos Mar 11, 2004Law logic -- an artificial system of reasoning, exclusively used in courts of justice, but good for nothing anywhere else.~ John Quincy AdamsOne of the Seven [wise men of Greece] was wont to say: That laws were like cobwebs, where the small flies are caught and the great break through.~ Sir Francis BaconIt is a part of the function of “law” to give recognition to ideas representing the exact opposite of established conduct. Most of the complications arise from the necessity of pretending to do one thing, while actually doing another.~ Thurman Arnold Previous week's quotes Next week's quotes Share on Facebook Tweet Email Print