American Judge Quotes

I throw a kiss across the sea, I drink the winds as drinking wine, And dream they all are blown from thee, I catch the whisper'd kiss of thine.

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.

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.

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.

It is now well established that the Constitution protects the right to receive information and ideas.... This right to receive information and ideas, regardless of their social worth,... is fundamental to our free society.

Thurgood Marshall

Judges must follow their oaths and do their duty, heedless of editorials, letters, telegrams, threats, petitions, panellists and talk shows.In this country, we do not administer justice by plebiscite. A judge…is a public servant who must follow his conscience, whether or not he counters the manifest wishes of those he serves; whether or not his decision seems a surrender to prevalent demands.

Hiller B. Zobel

By requiring that an execution be relatively painless, we necessarily protect the inmate from enduring any punishment that is comparable to the suffering inflicted on his victim. This trend, while appropriate and required by the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, actually undermines the very premise on which public approval of the retribution rationale is based.

John Paul Stevens

Man is more than merely an animal to exist and propagate his species. His mind gives him capacity to search out the great truths in God's arrangement and this lifts him far above the other animal creation.

Joseph Franklin Rutherford

Man, fearfully and wonderfully made, is the workmanship of his all perfect Creator: A State; useful and valuable as the contrivance is, is the inferior contrivance of man; and from his native dignity derives all its acquired importance.

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.

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

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

This monkey mythology of Darwin is the cause of permissiveness, promiscuity, pills, prophylactics, perversions, abortions, pornography, pollution, poisoning, and proliferation of crimes of all types.

Braswell Deen, Jr.

What I worry about is that when problems are not addressed, people will not know who is responsible. And when the problems get bad enough – as they might do, for example, another serious terrorist attack, as they might do with another financial meltdown – some one person will come forward and say, "Give me total power, and I will solve this problem." That is how the Roman republic fell….That is how democracy dies. And if something is not done to improve the level of civic knowledge, that is what you should worry about at night.

We cannot sanction the view that the Constitution, while solicitous of the cognitive content of individual speech, has little or no regard for that emotive function which, practically speaking, may often be the more important element of the overall message sought to be communicated.

John Marshall Harlan II

I am quite aware that owing to some of its scenes [James Joyce's] Ulysses is a rather strong draught to ask some sensitive, though normal, persons to take. But my considered opinion, after long reflection, is that whilst in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac. Ulysses may, therefore, be admitted into the United States.

John M. Woolsey