Court Quotes

400+ Sourced quotes

During the earlier years of the League we were fortunate in having many statesmen of outstanding ability who were convinced supporters of international cooperation under the League Covenant. … It is enough to say that under the leadership of those great men the first ten years of the League of Nations was a period of almost unbroken prosperity. The League moved from strength to strength. It established its organization and its Secretariat — a very remarkable achievement which has worked extremely well. Then, too, came the Permanent Court of International Justice, which has also been a very marked success and which, I trust, will establish ultimately the rule of law in all international affairs.

Robert Cecil, 1st Viscount Cecil of Chelwood

Inconvenience arising from the operation of an Act of Parliament can be no ground of argument in a Court of law.

Richard Arden, 1st Baron Alvanley

Both the court and the general public give a conventional value to men and things, and then are surprised to find themselves deceived by it. This is as if arithmeticians should give a variable an arbitrary value to the figures in a sum, and then, after restoring their true and regular value in the addition, be astonished at the incorrectness of their answer.

Nicolas Chamfort

The Court must be living in another world. Day by day, case by case, it is busy designing a Constitution for a country I do not recognize

We have a Supreme Court, like yours, which, since we put a charter of rights in our constitution in 1982, is becoming increasingly arbitrary and important. It is also appointed by the Prime Minister. Unlike your Supreme Court, we have no ratification process.

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

When the Supreme Court says baseball isn't run like a business, everybody jumps up and down with joy. When I say the same thing, everybody throws pointy objects at me.

Of Samuel Johnson:

You have a memory that would convict any author of plagiarism in any court of literature in the world.

John Hawkesworth

One is entitled to say without qualification that the correlation between prior judicial experience and fitness for the Supreme Court is zero.

Felix Frankfurter

The broadening of the economic order which came to be seated in the individual property owner… dramatized by Jefferson's purchase of the Louisiana Territory… The supremacy of corporate economic power… consolidated by the Supreme Court decision of 1886 which declared that the Fourteenth Amendment protected the corporation… [the New Deal, leading to], within the political arena, as well as in the corporate world itself, competing centers of power that challenged those of the corporate directors.

C. Wright Mills

I love judges, and I love courts. They are my ideals, that typify on earth what we shall meet hereafter in heaven under a just God.

William Howard Taft

After the Reagan years, there were only three people of color in the Republican Party. Their slogan was 'Republicans - the Other White Meat.' George [H.] Bush tried to dispel the 'whites only' image of his party, often referring to his Mexican-American grandkids as 'the little brown ones over there,' and nominated Clarence Uncle Thomas to the Supreme Court.

Throughout my career, my mind rarely wandered, and I was never sidetracked by distractions, no matter what I was going through off the court.

Anyway, I was the one in real danger. I got cornered by a pack of wild sorority girls in the food court. Apparently it's mating season.

This committee is not established in the hierarchy of the United Nations or in international law as a body competent or empowered to resolve territorial disputes. It is the International Court of Justice that is there for that. But – as you know and we have repeated ad nauseam – the Spanish Government's bravado has never extended to elevating the territorial matters they boldly argue before you to the ICJ. You should tell them to do so.

Let us face the inevitable truth. There can be no Americanization from the top down or in the mass. It will not come from the court that grants a citizenship certificate; nor from the school that teaches English; nor from the speakers that talk patriotism; nor from the patriotic society that prints platitudes. It will come from basic conditions being right, and none is more vital than industrial relations. It will live as we shorten the distance between the Constitution and the shop. It will be believed in as we square every act in the shops of America with every utterance in public print.

Oh, stay, sweet warbling woodlark, stay, Nor quit for me the trembling spray, A hapless lover courts thy lay, Thy soothing, fond complaining.

We are obliged to hear all that witnesses have to say; but it is a canticle of Courts of justice that witnesses non numerentur sed ponderentur: they are not to be numbered but weighed. It is the nature of the human mind, it is the perfection of the human heart, to serve a friend in distress; but in doing so, a man should not transgress the higher calls of religion and morality, the obligations of an oath. We are not monks and recluses, as was said in another place,1 but come from a class in society that I hope and believe gives us opportunities of seeing as much of the world, and that has as much virtue amongst its members as any other, however elevated.

Lloyd Kenyon, 1st Baron Kenyon

The legal system is designed to protect men from the superior power of the state but not to protect women or children from the superior power of men. It therefore provides strong guarantees for the rights of the accused but essentially no guarantees for the rights of the victim. If one set out by design to devise a system for provoking intrusive post-traumatic symptoms, one could not do better than a court of law.

Judith Lewis Herman

If you once cede to the Court the power to decide elections, let alone even the power to halt counting of the votes, then you have ceded it everything.