Quotes by Judges - Page 2

To make a man happy fill his hands with work.
Frederick E. Crane
The attainment of justice is the highest human endeavor.
Florence Ellinwood Allen
To make a man happy fill his hands with work his heart with affection his mind with purpose his memory with useful knowledge his future with hope and his stomach with food.
Frederick E. Crane
Tyranny is yielding to the lust of governing.
Lord Moulton
Republics are brought to their ends by luxury monarchies by poverty.
Baron de Montesquieu
If triangles had a God he would have three sides.
Baron de Montesquieu
Mothers can get weaned as well as babies.
Thomas Chandler Haliburton
There are no illegitimate children - only illegitimate parents.
Leon R. Yankwich
If you play it safe in life you've decided that you don't want to grow anymore.
Shirley Hufstedler
To carry care to bed is to sleep with a pack on your back.
Thomas C. Haliburton
No man is rich whose expenditure exceeds his means and no one is poor whose incomings exceed his outgoings.
Thomas Haliburton
A delusion a mockery and a snare.
Lord Denman
A blind man in a dark room - looking for a black hat which isn't there.
Lord Bowen
We accept the verdict of the past until the need for change cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of further inertia and the irksomeness of action.
Learned Hand
The less men think the more they talk.
Charles Montesquieu
Circumstances alter cases.
Thomas Haliburton
Christianity is part of the Common Law of England.
Mathew Hale
To carry care to bed is to sleep with a pack on your back.
Thomas Haliburton
You know you're getting older when you don't care where your wife goes just so you don't have to go along.
Jacob Braude
The art of publicity is a black art.
Learned Hand
We accept the verdict of the past until the need for change cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of further inertia and the irksomeness of action.
Learned Hand
There were no actual villains, just inertia. The administration genuinely wanted more diversity for reasons of its image as well as fairness, notwithstanding the cranky alumni letters in The Daily Princetonian. ... Hiring committees had not a clue where to look for or how to attract suitable candidates. And so, though a high-level recruitment plan existed on paper, there was only foot-dragging and defensive excuse making.
Sonia Sotomayor
The differences were plain enough, and yet I saw that they were as nothing compared with what we had in common. As I lay in bed at night, the sky outside my window reflecting the city's dim glow, I thought about Abuelita’s fierce loyalty to blood. But what really binds people as family? The way they shore themselves up with stories; the way siblings can feud bitterly but still come through for each other; how an untimely death, a child gone before a parent, shakes the very foundations; how the weaker ones, the ones with invisible wounds, are sheltered; how a constant din is medicine against loneliness; and how celebrating the same occasions year after year steels us to the changes they herald. And always food at the center of it all.
Sonia Sotomayor
What should our second generation have done, what should it do with the knowledge of the horrors of the extermination of the Jews? We should not believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible, we may not compare the incomparable, we may not inquire because to inquire is to make the horrors an object of discussion, even if the horrors themselves are not questioned, instead of accepting them as something in the face of which we can only fall silent in revulsion, shame and guilt. Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame and guilt? To what purpose?
Bernhard Schlink
[T]he habit of living as if in the shadow of death has remained with me, and I consider that, too, a gift.
Sonia Sotomayor
But the fact that judges follow precedent regularly even though not invariably does not support the legalistic theory as strongly as one might expect. The original precedent in a line of precedents could not have been based on precedent.
Richard A. Posner
This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.
Antonin Scalia
This free will business is a bit terrifying anyway. It's almost pleasanter to obey, and make the most of it.
Ugo Betti
Learning how to balance the needs of individuals with the no-less-real needs of an institution was an important lesson. It's fine to be on the side of the little guy, but he too will ultimately suffer if the health and concerns of the greater body he belongs to are neglected.
Sonia Sotomayor
As difficult an environment as the DA's Office could be, I saw no overarching conspiracy against women. The unequal treatment was usually more a matter of old habits dying hard.
Sonia Sotomayor
It’s quite simple," she says, while Rosentreter wonders, not without anxiety, whether she can read his thoughts. "You draw air into your lungs, you raise your soft palate, air passes over your vocal cords, and you move your lips and tongue. Or, to put it another way, you speak.
Juli Zeh
In my experience when a friend unloaded about a boyfriend or spouse, the listener soaked up the complaint and remembered it long after the speaker had forgiven the offense.
Sonia Sotomayor
My mind s a center of divine operations
Thomas Troward
If you play it safe in life, you've decided that you don't want to grow anymore.
Shirley M Hufstedler
If you held to principle so passionately, so inflexibly, indifferent in the particulars of circumstance - the full range of what human beings, with all their flaws and foibles, might endure or create - if you enthroned principle above even reason, weren't you then abdicating the responsibilities of a thinking person?
Sonia Sotomayor
People believe what they want to believe. Even if it isn’t true.
Julian Houston
I would warn any minority student today against the temptations of self-segregation: take support and comfort from your own group as you can, but don’t hide within it.
Sonia Sotomayor
Does it look like I have stupid written across my forehead
Judge Judy Sheindlin
Dumb ideas come from people who have dumb brains
Judge Judy Sheindlin
If it doesn't make sense, it's usually not true.
Judy Sheindlin
So that originally, and Naturally, there is no such thing as Slavery. Joseph was rightfully no more a Slave to his brethren, then they were to him: and they no more Authority to Sell him, than they had to Slay him. [Genesis 37].
Samuel Sewall
Which is better: to dare to look directly into the blinding present, no matter how painful, or to await the detachment of hindsight -- which, being less painful, is more objective?
Thomas Buergenthal
We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive. If we stand still we shall be frozen to death. If we take the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly know whether there is any right one. What must we do? 'Be strong and of a good courage.' Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes.... If death ends all, we cannot meet death better.
Fitzjames Stephen
People ask all the time what I learned in the camps. But the camps weren’t therapy. What do you think these places were? Universities? We didn’t go there to learn. One becomes very clear about these things. What are you asking for? Forgiveness for her? Or do you just want to feel better yourself? My advice, go to the theatre, if you want catharsis, please. Go to literature. Don't go to the camps. Nothing comes out of the camps. Nothing.
Bernhard Schlink
Each man must administer his hatred cautiously. Mine is equitable. I distribute it evenly among those who are frozen in the past and those who perspire in the present. Because while the former are hemorrhoidal in their sensibility, the latter are constipated in the brain. And they complement each other by both betraying the law of life that demands the immediate defecation of all useless detritus, be it antiquated illusion or contemporary cowardice.
Juan Filloy
The Latino community anchored me, but I didn't want it to isolate me from the full extent of what Princeton had to offer, including engagement with the larger community. Page 148
Sonia Sotomayor
The dynamism of any diverse community depends not only on the diversity itself but on promoting a sense of belonging among those who formerly would have been considered and felt themselves outsiders.
Sonia Sotomayor
The challenges I have faced—among them material poverty, chronic illness, and being raised by a single mother—are not uncommon, but neither have they kept me from uncommon achievements.
Sonia Sotomayor
...you cannot value dreams according to the odds of their coming true. The real value is in stirring within us the will to aspire.
Sonia Sotomayor
Sonia lives her life fully. If she dies tomorrow, she'll die happy. If she lives the way you want her to live, she'll die miserable. So leave her alone, okay?
Sonia Sotomayor
[A]lthough wisdom is built on life experience, the mere accumulation of years guarantees nothing.
Sonia Sotomayor
I think that even someone who got into an institution through affirmative action could prove they were qualified by what they accomplished there. Page 188
Sonia Sotomayor
It seems obvious now: the child who spends school days in a fog of semi-comprehension has no way to know her problem is not that she is slow-witted.
Sonia Sotomayor
I had no need to apologize that the look-wider, search-more affirmative action that Princeton and Yale practiced had opened doors for me. That was its purpose: to create the conditions whereby students from disadvantaged backgrounds could be brought to the starting line of a race many were unaware was even being run.
Sonia Sotomayor
Bravery is good when the cause is good.
Bernhard Schlink
The substance of what I have to say to the disadvantage of the theory and practice of universal suffrage is that it tends to invert what I should have regarded as the true and natural relation between wisdom and folly. I think that wise and good men ought to rule those who are foolish and bad. To say that the sole function of the wise and good is to preach to their neighbors, and that everyone indiscriminately should be left to do what he likes, should be provided with a ratable share of the sovereign power in the shape of the vote, and that the result of this will be the direction of power by wisdom, seems to me the wildest romance that ever got possession of any considerable number of minds.
James Fitzjames Stephen
The bad parts of the statute are not judicially severable, I consider, from the rest of its provisions that deal with imprisonment. Their roots are entangled too tenaciously in the surrounding soil for a clean extraction to be feasible. The conclusion to which I accordingly come is that we are left with no option but to declare those provisions as a whole to be constitutionally invalid on account of their objectionable overbreadth.
John Didcott
If the good is not dependent on the bad and can be separated from it, one gives effect to the good that remains after the separation if it still gives effect to the main objective.
Johann Kriegler
The difference between the past and the present is that individual freedom and security no longer fall to be protected solely through the D vehicle of common-law maxims and presumptions which may be altered or repealed by statute, but are now protected by entrenched constitutional provisions which neither the Legislature nor the Executive may abridge. It would accordingly be improper for us to hold constitutional a system which, as Sachs J has noted, confers on creditors the power to consign the person of an impecunious debtor to prison at will and without the interposition at the crucial time of a judicial officer.
Pius Langa
My conclusions, on this point, are as follows: when the Law Commission says committal of judgment debtors is an anomaly that cannot be justified and should be abolished; when it is common cause that there is a general international move away from imprisonment for civil debt, of which the present committal proceedings are an adapted relic; when such imprisonment has been abolished in South Africa, save for its contested form as contempt of court in the magistrate's court; when the clauses concerned have already been interpreted by the Courts as restrictively as possible, without their constitutionally offensive core being eviscerated; when other tried and tested methods exist for recovery of debt from those in a position to pay; when the violation of the fundamental right to personal freedom is manifest, and the procedures used must inevitably possess a summary character if they are to be economically worthwhile to the creditor, then the very institution of civil imprisonment, however it may be described and however well directed its procedures might be, in itself must be regarded as highly questionable and not a compelling claimant for survival.
Albie Sachs