William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield Quotes

10 Sourced Quotes

Tut, man, decide promptly, but never give any reasons for your decisions. Your decisions may be right, but your reasons are sure to be wrong.

William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield
Anciently, the Courts of justice did sit on Sundays.

William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield
A man wants no protection when his conduct is strictly right.

William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield
Whatever is contrary, bonos mores est decorum, the principles of our law prohibit, and the King's Court, as the general censor and guardian of the public manners, is bound to restrain and punish.

William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield
The last end that can happen to any man, never comes too soon, if he falls in support of the law and liberty of his country: for liberty is synonymous to law and government.

William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield
The constitution does not allow reasons of state to influence our judgements: God forbid it should! We must not regard political consequences; however formidable soever they might be: if rebellion was the certain consequence, we are bound to say 'fiat justitia, ruat caelum'.

William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield
An estimated value is a precarious measure of justice, compared with the specific thing.

William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield
As mathematical and absolute certainty is seldom to be attained in human affairs, reason and public utility require that judges and all mankind in forming their opinions of the truth of facts should be regulated by the superior number of the probabilities on the one side or the other whether the amount of these probabilities be expressed in words and arguments or by figures and numbers.

William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield
I will not avoid doing what I think is right, though it should draw on me the whole artillery that falsehood and malice can invent, or the credulity a deluded population can swallow.

William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield
I wish popularity; but it is that popularity which follows, not that which is run after--it is that popularity which sooner or later never fails to do justice to the pursuit of noble ends by noble means.

William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield