Law Courts Quotes

• Litigation: A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Pigs, Law, Machines

  Ambrose Bierce (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Illustrated)”, p.2450, Delphi Classics

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• Justice is the tolerable accommodation of the conflicting interests of society, and I don't believe there is any royal road to attain such accommodation concretely.

  Learned Hand

  Believe, Justice, Royal

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• The Supreme Court of the United States is an institution damned by God Almighty.

  Jimmy Swaggart

  Religious, Court Judges, Scary

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• The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Life, Law, Logic

  The Common Law Lecture 1 (1881).

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• The makers of our Constitution . . . conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone - the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.

  Louis D. Brandeis

  Men, Rights, Liberty

  Olmstead v. United States (dissenting opinion) (1928) See Brandeis 1

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• At the foundation of our civil liberties lies the principle that denies to government officials an exceptional position before the law and which subjects them to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen.

  Louis D. Brandeis

  Lying, Government, Law

  "Burdeau v. McDowell, 256 U.S. 465, 477". Dissenting opinion, 1921.

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• It is emphatically the province and duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is.

  John Marshall

  Law, Judicial Review, Court

  Marbury v. Madison (1803)

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• Crime is contagious....if the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law.

  Louis D. Brandeis

  War, Government, Law

  Olmstead v. United States (dissenting opinion) (1928)

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• But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.

  Frederic Bastiat

  Law, Government, Giving

  Frederic Bastiat (2006). “The Law”, p.18, Filiquarian Publishing, LLC.

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• It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Love, Inspirational, Acceptance

  1962 Speech at Cornell College, Mt Vernon, Iowa. Reported in the Wall Street Journal, 13 Nov.

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• Our government... teaches the whole people by its example. If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.

  Louis D. Brandeis

  Change, Men, Law

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• There is no such thing as justice - in or out of court.

  Clarence Darrow

  Revenge, Justice, Ears

  Quoted in N.Y. Times, 19 Apr. 1936

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• The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.

  Louis D. Brandeis

  Peace, Freedom, War

  Olmstead v. United States (dissenting opinion) (1928)

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• It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do.

  Edmund Burke

  Law, Justice, Humanity

  "On Moving His Resolutions for Conciliation with the Colonies," 22 Mar. 1775

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• To 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.

  Louis D. Brandeis

  Mean, Government, Order

  Olmstead v. United States (dissenting opinion) (1928)

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• Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent.

  Louis D. Brandeis

  Government, Libertarian Party, Security And Freedom

  Olmstead v. United States (dissenting opinion) (1928)

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• You can no more bridle passions with logic than you can justify them in the law courts. Passions are facts and not dogmas.

  Alexander Herzen

  Passion, Law, Facts

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• The position we have now reached is this: starting from the State, we try to remedy the failures of all the families, all the nurseries, all the schools, all the workshops, all the secondary institutions that once had some authority of their own. Everything is ultimately brought into the Law Courts. We are trying to stop the leak at the other end.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  School, Law, Trying

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• Mere human beings cant afford to be fanatical about anything. Not even about justice or loyalty. The fanatic for justice ends by murdering a million helpless people to clear a space for his law-courts. If we are to survive on this planet, there must be compromises.

  Storm Jameson

  Loyalty, Law, Space

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• Thus rhetoric, it seems, is a producer of persuasion for belief, not for instruction in the matter of right and wrong ... And so the rhetorician's business is not to instruct a law court or a public meeting in matters of right and wrong, but only to make them believe.

  Plato

  Plato, Believe, Law

  Plato, Harold North Fowler, Walter Rangeley Maitland Lamb, Robert Gregg Bury (1953). “Plato”

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• I have come to regard the law courts not as a cathedral but rather as a casino.

  Richard Ingrams

  Power, Law, Casinos

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• Where death without resistance or death after resistance is the only way, neither party should think of resorting to law-courts or help from the government.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Death, Party, Thinking

  Mahatma Gandhi (1967). “Collected Works”

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• The race of prophets is extinct. Europe is becoming set in its ways, slowly embalming itself beneath the wrappings of its borders, its factories, its law-courts and its universities. The frozen Mind cracks between the mineral staves which close upon it.

  Antonin Artaud

  Race, Europe, Law

  Antonin Artaud (1968). “Collected works”, Calder Publications Limited

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• Most magazines have that look of being predestined to be left which one sees on the faces of the women whose troubles bring them to the Law Courts.

  Rebecca West

  Law, Looks, Magazines

  Rebecca West (2010). “The Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews”, p.143, Open Road Media

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• If it is life that you feel you are missing I can tell you where to find it. In the law courts, in business, in government. There is nothing occurring in the streets. Nothing but a dumbshow
  composed of the helpless and the impotent.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Government, Law, Missing

  Cormac McCarthy (2010). “Suttree”, p.15, Pan Macmillan

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