Quotes by Jurists

There is an accuracy that defeats itself by the overemphasis of details. I often say that one must permit oneself and quite advisedly and deliberately a certain margin of misstatement.
Benjamin N. Cardozo
Not to know certain things is a great part of wisdom.
Hugo Grotius
It simply is not true that war never settles anything.
Felix Frankfurter
Time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary.
Sir William Blackstone
A state is a perfect body of free men united together to enjoy common rights and advantages.
Hugo Grotius
They (the blacks) had no right which the white man was bound to respect.
Roger B. Taney
Security can only be achieved through constant change through discarding old ideas that have outlived their usefulness and adapting others to current facts.
William O. Douglas
That the king can do no wrong is a necessary and fundamental principle of the English constitution.
Sir William Blackstone
Never tell your resolution beforehand.
John Selden
Prayer should be short without giving God Almighty reasons why He should grant this or that He knows best what is good for us.
John Selden
We are what we believe we are.
Benjamin N. Cardozo
I don't like a man to be too efficient. He's likely to be not human enough.
Felix Frankfurter
The sports page records people's accomplishments the front page usually records nothing but man's failures.
Earl Warren
Never tell your resolution beforehand.
John Selden
Prayer should be short without giving God Almighty reasons why He should grant this or that He knows best what is good for us.
John Selden
We are what we believe we are.
Benjamin N. Cardozo
I don't like a man to be too efficient. He's likely to be not human enough.
Felix Frankfurter
The sports page records people's accomplishments the front page usually records nothing but man's failures.
Earl Warren
Men are more often bribed by their loyalties and ambitions than by money.
Robert H. Jackson
Time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary.
Sir William Blackstone
Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile I caught Hell for.
Earl Warren
It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have frequently been forged in cases involving not very nice people.
Felix Frankfurter
To some lawyers all facts are created equal.
Felix Frankfurter
Reason is the life of the law nay the common law itself is nothing else but reason. The law which is perfection of reason.
Sir Edward Coke
Fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalized medium of reason that's all we have standing between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled undisciplined feeling.
Felix Frankfurter
The Court's authority - possessed of neither the purse nor the sword -ultimately rests on substantial public confidence in its moral sanctions.
Felix Frankfurter
Judges are but men and are swayed like other men by vehement prejudices. This is corruption in reality give it whatever other name you please.
David Dudley Field
Judges are apt to be naive simple-minded men.
O. W. Holmes II
It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.
Sir William Blackstone
When rogues fall out honest men get into their own.
Sir Matthew Hale
For a man's home is his castle.
Sir Edward Coke
The greatest happiness of the greatest number.
Cesare Beccaria
We are under a Constitution but the Constitution is what the judges say it is.
Charles Evans Hughes
Share the passion and action of your time at peril of being judged not to have lived.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Old friends are best. King James used to call for his old shoes they were the easiest for his feet.
John Selden
Some men are graduated from college cum laude some are graduated summa cum laude and some are graduated mirabile dictu.
William Howard Taft
While democracy must have its organization and controls its vital breath is individual liberty.
Charles Evans Hughes
Security can only be achieved through constant change through discarding old ideas that have outlived their usefulness and adapting others to current facts.
William O. Douglas
They (corporations) cannot commit treason nor be outlawed nor excommunicated for they have no souls.
Sir Edward Coke
We are now at the point where we must decide whether we are to honour the concept of a plural society which gains strength through diversity or whether we are to have bitter fragmentation that will result in perpetual tension and strife.
Earl Warren
I'm very pleased with each advancing year. It stems back to when I was forty. I was a bit upset about reaching that milestone but an older friend consoled me. 'Don't complain about growing old - many people don't have that privilege.'
Earl Warren
In every country the intellectual class is the most influential class. This is the class which can foresee advice and lead. In no country does the mass of the people live the life for intelligent thought and action. It is largely imitative and follows the intellectual class. There is no exaggeration in saying that the entire destination of the country depends upon its intellectual class. If the intellectual class is honest and independent, it can be trusted to take the initiative and give a proper lead when a crisis arises. It is true that the intellect by itself is no virtue. It is only a means and the use of a means depends upon the ends which an intellectual person pursues. An intellectual man can be a good man but he may easily be a rogue. Similarly an intellectual class may be a band of high-souled persons, ready to help, ready to emancipate erring humanity or it may easily be a gang of crooks or a body of advocates of narrow clique from which it draws its support.
B.R. Ambedkar
Humans are mortal. So are ideas. An idea needs propagation as much as a plant needs watering. Otherwise both will wither and die.
B.R. Ambedkar
A great man is different from an eminent one in that he is ready to be the servant of the society.
B.R. Ambedkar
Political tyranny is nothing compared to the social tyranny and a reformer who defies society is a more courageous man than a politician who defies Government.
B.R. Ambedkar
I measure the progress of a community by the degree of progress which women have achieved.
B.R. Ambedkar
If I find the constitution being misused, I shall be the first to burn it.
B.R. Ambedkar
I do not want that our loyalty as Indians should be in the slightest way affected by any competitive loyalty whether that loyalty arises out of our religion, out of our culture or out of our language. I want all people to be Indians first, Indian last and nothing else but Indians.
B.R. Ambedkar
I'll be damned if I am not getting tired of this. It seems to be the profession of a President simply to hear other people talk.
William Howard Taft
I have never heard anyone profess indifference to a boat race. Why should you row a boat race? Why endure long months of pain in preparation of a fierce half hour, or even six minutes, that will leave you all but dead? Does anyone ask the question? Is there anyone who would not go through all its costs, and more, for the moment when anguish breaks into triumph - or even for the glory of having nobly lost? Is life less than a boat race? If a man will give all the blood in his body to win the one, will he not spend all the might of his soul to prevail in the other?
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Certitude leads to violence. This is a proposition that has an easy application and a difficult one. The easy application is to ideoologues, dogmatists, and bullies--people who think that their rigtness justifies them in imposing on anyone who does not happen to suscribe to their particular ideology, dogma or notion of turf. If the conviction of rightness is powerful enough, resistance to it will be met, sooner or later by force. There are people like this in every sphere of life, and it is natural to feel that the world would be a better place without them!
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
We seek to find peace of mind in the word, the formula, the ritual. The hope is illusion.
Benjamin Cardozo
Poor, ill-advised Roderich! What evil power did you conjure up to poison in its first youth the race you thought to have planted for eternity?
E.T.A. Hoffmann
Lost rights are never regained by appeals to the conscience of the usurpers, but by relentless struggle.... Goats are used for sacrificial offerings and not lions.
B.R. Ambedkar
Cultivation of mind should be the ultimate aim of human existence.
B.R. Ambedkar
happy is the nation without a history
Cesare Beccaria
We are very quiet there, but it is the quiet of a storm centre. .
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Wisdom too often never comes, so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.
Felix Frankfurter
On the 26th of January 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality.In politics we will be recognizing the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value.In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value.How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions? How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life? If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by putting our political democracy in peril. We must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy which this Assembly has so laboriously built up.
B.R. Ambedkar