American Judge Quotes

Antonin Scalia

Earl Warren

Neil Gorsuch

Clarence Thomas

Sandra Day O'Connor

William Rehnquist

Charles Evans Hughes

Imagine my surprise one day in February 1951 to read in the newspaper that John J. McCloy, the high commissioner to Germany, had restored all the Krupp properties that had been ordered confiscated.

William J. Wilkins (Washington state judge)

In a very real sense, the Constitution is our compact with history... [but] the Constitution can maintain that compact and serve as the lodestar of our political system only if its terms are binding on us. To the extent we depart from the document's language and rely instead on generalities that we see written between the lines, we rob the Constitution of its binding force and give free reign to the fashions and passions of the day.

You came here loving Columbia Law School, I want you to leave here loving it a little bit more.

I sometimes feel as if I am watching justice die.

A. Leon Higginbotham Jr.

The Court is perhaps one of the last citadels of jealously preserved individualism. For the most part, we function as nine, small independent law firms.

Lewis F. Powell, Jr.

I have no hesitation in applying a law regardless of what I might think about it, I think any good judge recognizes his or her place in our constitutional government, and that place is not to upset the will of the people as expressed through their elected representatives. So, I do not have any compunction about following the law as written by Congress.

Thomas Hardiman

Many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children's schools, or as boarders in their home. They view this as protecting themselves and their families from a lifestyle that they believe to be immoral and destructive.

The door of the Free Exercise Clause stands tightly closed against any government regulation of religious beliefs as such. Government may neither compel affirmation of a repugnant belief, nor penalize or discriminate against individuals or groups because they hold views abhorrent to the authorities.

William J. Brennan, Jr.

The old idea of a good bargain was a transaction in which one man got the better of another. The new idea of a good contract is a transaction which is good for both parties to it.

It would be almost unbelievable, if history did not record the tragic fact, that men have gone to war and cut each other's throats because they could not agree as to what was to become of them after their throats were cut.

Walter P. Stacy

In ancient Israel and Rome the judge had appeared as a stand-in for the divine, and corruption was a blinding of the representative of the divine.

John T. Noonan, Jr.

These in the robings of glory,
Those in the gloom of defeat,
All with the battle-blood gory,
In the dusk of eternity meet;—

Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment-day;—
Under the laurel the Blue,
Under the willow, the Gray.

Francis Miles Finch

Fill every beaker up, my men, pour forth the cheering wine:
There's life and strength in every drop,—thanksgiving to the vine!

Albert Gorton Greene

Philosophy became a gloomy science, in the labyrinth of which people vainly tried to find the exit, called The Truth.

Edward Joseph Schwartz

Don't be shy about making a teacher of any willing party who knows what he or she is doing.

Sonia Sotomayor

The kind of corruption the media talk about, the kind the Supreme Court was concerned about, involves the putative sale of votes in exchange for campaign contributions.

James L. Buckley

For better or worse, editing is what editors are for; and editing is selection and choice of material. That editors newspaper or broadcast can and do abuse this power is beyond doubt, but that is no reason to deny the discretion Congress provided.

Warren E. Burger

We will be completely exterminated, and the land will be left in the possession of the blacks, and then it will go back into a wilderness and become another Africa or St. Domingo.

Henry L. Benning

While unconstitutional exercise of power by the executive and legislative branches of the government is subject to judicial restraint, the only check upon our own exercise of power is our own sense of self-restraint. For the removal of unwise laws from the statute books appeal lies not to the courts but to the ballot and to the processes of democratic government.

Harlan F. Stone

Resort to science has rendered modern war so destructive of life and property that it presents a new problem to mankind, such, that unless our civilization shall find some means of making an end to war, war will make an end to our civilization.

John Hessin Clarke

What is it about the government and its agents and employees that they can lie to us with impunity, but we risk being sent to jail if we lie to them?

Andrew Napolitano

When Shakespeare begins his exposition thus he generally at first makes people talk about the hero, but keeps the hero himself for some time out of sight, so that we await his entrance with curiosity, and sometimes with anxiety.

Andrew Coyle Bradley

I think it is important for judges not to have agendas or to have strong ideology or ideological views. That is baggage.

Clarence Thomas

Future lawyers should be more aware that law is not a system of abstract logic, but the web of arrangements, rooted in history but also in hopes, for promoting to a maximum the full use of a nation's resources and talents.

Felix Frankfurter

A prime part of the history of our Constitution is the story of the extension of constitutional rights to people once ignored or excluded.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg