Top 9 Quotes & Sayings by Harlan F. Stone

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American judge Harlan F. Stone.

Last updated on December 21, 2024.

Harlan Fiske Stone was an American lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1925 to 1941 and then as the 12th chief justice of the United States from 1941 until his death in 1946. He also served as the U.S. Attorney General from 1924 to 1925 under President Calvin Coolidge, with whom he had attended Amherst College as a young man. His most famous dictum was: "Courts are not the only agency of government that must be assumed to have capacity to govern."

American - Judge | October 11, 1872 - April 22, 1946

Source: Wikipedia

Words, especially those of a constitution, are not to be read with such stultifying narrowness.

Harlan F. Stone

The law itself is on trial quite as much as the cause which is to be decided.

Harlan F. Stone

The guarantees of civil liberty are but guarantees of freedom of the human mind and spirit and of reasonable freedom and opportunity to express them...The very essence of the liberty which they guarantee is the freedom of the individual from compulsion as to what he shall think and what he shall say...

Harlan F. Stone

The right to participate in the choice of representatives for Congress includes, as we have said, the right to cast a ballot and to have it counted at the general election whether for the successful candidate or not.

Harlan F. Stone

The taxing power of the Federal Government, my dear; the taxing power is sufficient for everything you want and need.

Harlan F. Stone

There is grim irony in speaking of the freedom of contract of those who, because of their economic necessities, give their service for less than is needful to keep body and soul together.

Harlan F. Stone

History teaches us that there have been but few infringements of personal liberty by the state which have not been justified, as they are here, in the name of righteousness and the public good, and few which have not been directed, as they are now, at politically helpless minorities.

Harlan F. Stone

If a juror feels that the statute involved in any criminal offence is unfair, or that it infringes upon the defendant's natural god-given unalienable or constitutional rights, then it is his duty to affirm that the offending statute is really no law at all and that the violation of it is no crime at all, for no one is bound to obey an unjust law.

Harlan F. Stone

The [tenth] amendment states but a truism that all is retained which has not been surrendered.

Harlan F. Stone

Top 9 Quotes & Sayings by Harlan F. Stone

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