Top 729 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Judges - Page 7

New Jersey has decided that fewer handguns legally carried in public means less crime. It is obvious that the justifiable need requirement functions as a rationing system designed to limit the number of handguns carried in New Jersey.

The coercive effect of this policy is particularly pronounced in the school setting given the age and impressionability of schoolchildren, and their understanding that they are required to adhere to the norms set by their school, their teacher, and their fellow students.

If I have brought any message today, it is this: Have the courage to have your wisdom regarded as stupidity. Be fools for Christ. And have the courage to suffer the contempt of the sophisticated world.

One usually dies because one is alone, or because one has got into something over one's head. One often dies because one does not have the right alliances, because one is not given support. In Sicily the Mafia kills the servants of the State that the State has not been able to protect.

To give a man his life but deny him his liberty, is to take from him all that makes his life worth living. To give him his liberty but take from him the property which is the fruit and badge of his liberty, is to still leave him a slave.

A lawyer who makes an impression as credible, competent, and civil is one whose thoughts I'll take seriously.

The great joy of being a prosecutor is that you don't take whatever case walks in the door. You evaluate the case; you make your best judgement. You only go forward if you believe that the defendant is guilty.

Women will only have true equality when men share with them the responsibility of bringing up the next generation.

It is time... to end the long-standing and unproductive methodological debate over 'originalism' versus 'dynamism' or 'evolution' and focus instead on how, as a substantive matter, we should interpret the Constitution in the twenty-first century, and what it has to say on questions unimaginable to our eighteenth-century Framers.

Our Constitution was not written in the sands to be washed away by each wave of new judges blown in by each successive political wind.

The real difference between the United States and other nations lies not in the words of the preamble to the Constitution, but in the fact that the substantive clauses of that Constitution are enforced by individuals independent of and not beholden to the elected branches.

The Boston College community took a personal interest in my success, not only as a student but as a human being.

Of course the welfare of our children is a legitimate state interest. However, limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples fails to further this interest. Instead, needlessly stigmatizing and humiliating children who are being raised by the loving couples targeted by Virginia's Marriage Laws betrays that interest. E. S.-T. [the 15-year-old daughter of two of the plaintiffs], like the thousands of children being raised by same-sex couples, is needlessly deprived of the protection, the stability, the recognition and the legitimacy that marriage conveys.

Pontius Pilate was the first great censor and Jesus Christ the first great victim of censorship.

It's never appropriate for a judge to impose that judge's personal convictions - whether they derive from faith or anywhere else - on the law.

I propose that matchmaking should be approached like a corporate business venture. It can be risky, but I have discovered that the potential profits from acquisitions and mergers cannot be underestimated.

The result of cutting [political power] up into little bits is simply that the man who can sweep the greatest number into one heap will govern the rest... In a pure democracy the ruling men will be the wirepullers and their friends; but they will no more be on an equality with the voters than soldiers of Ministers of State are on an equality with the subjects of monarchy.

Every citizen has to figure out what kind of government he or she wants.

Just as the strength of the Internet is chaos, so the strength of our liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of the unfettered speech the First Amendment protects.

You can't fight for your rights if you don't know what they are.

To try to make men equal by altering social arrangements is like trying to make the cards of equal value by shuffling the pack.

Some of my colleagues I have the most differences with in decisions are ones with whom I have a very friendly relationship. You have to be able to step back and look at the issues and your colleagues.

Whereas if you have a camera in the courtroom, there's no filtering. What you see is what's there.

No, I think that we've got a basic discrepancy here between the rule of law versus the rule of man.

The law is constantly based on notions of morality, and if all laws representing essentially moral choices are to be invalidated under the due process clause, the courts will be very busy indeed.

Marriage is a mistake every man should make.

The unfortunate and inescapable historical truth is that those in government - from both parties and with a few courageous exceptions - do not feel constrained by the Constitution. They think they can do whatever they want.

Juries must, of necessity, be governed, in reaching many results through inferences from other facts, by certain laws of nature and human reason. They are often obliged to infer one thing from another, and this, whether that other be a fact direct or circumstantial.

Bluefin tuna spawn just south of the oil spill and they spawn only in the Gulf. If they were to go through the area at a critical time, that's one instance where a plume could destroy a whole species.

Unquestionably, it is the duty of every master to watch over the religious and moral culture of his slaves, and to give them every comfort and privilege that is not incompatible with the continued existence of the relations between them.

The states are not free, under the guise of protecting maternal health or potential life, to intimidate women into continuing pregnancies.

We cannot lightly allow the perpetrator of a serious crime to go free simply because that person believed his actions were reasonable and necessary to prevent some perceived harm.

The human brain is a wonderful organ. It starts to work as soon as you are born and doesn't stop until you get up to deliver a speech.

I would love to see churches start using their Web sites to present video profiles of people within their congregations so that the average person could get a sense of what the life of the church (not the organization, but the people - the true church) is really like.

The creation of a nuclear weapons convention is not only achievable, it is imperative if civilisation is to survive.

A free press stands as one of the great interpreters between the government and the people. To allow it to be fettered is to fetter ourselves.

I cannot subscribe to the omnipotence of a State legislature.

To the public, the press is not David among Goliaths; it has become one of the Goliaths, Big Media, a combination of powerful television networks, large magazine groups and newspaper chains that are near-monopolies.

We cannot let colorblindness become myopia which masks the reality that many "created equal" have been treated within our lifetimes as inferior both by the law and by their fellow citizens.

There are many causes why a people politically ignorant cannot be roused to action. Perfect political ignorance must be accompanied by indifference to the general interests of society, and thus one of the most powerful motives which can act on the human mind is totally destroyed.

The important thing is not establishing if you are afraid or not but it's to be able to live with your own fear without being influenced by it. Otherwise it's not courage anymore, but recklessness.

Privacy in one's associations... may in many circumstances be indispensable to freedom of association, particularly where a group espouses dissident beliefs.

The only shape in which equality is really connected with justice is this - justice presupposes general rules. If these general rules are to be maintained at all, it is obvious that they must be applied equally to every case which satisfies their terms.

By doing good with his money, a man, as it were, stamps the image of God upon it, and makes it pass current for the merchandise of heaven.

I demand for the unmarried mother, as a sacred channel of life, the same reverence and respect as for the married mother; for Maternity is a cosmic thing and once it has come to pass, our conversation must not be permitted to blaspheme it.

The United States is the greatest law factory the world has ever known.

I would make sure that the values that I would be enforcing if I were a judge are not just my values.

I am the most misunderstood and misrepresented of men. Misrepresented because misunderstood.

In approaching our subject it will be best, without attempting to shorten the path by referring to famous theories of the drama, to start directly from the facts, and to collect from them gradually an idea of Shakespearean Tragedy.

I was the only Jew who'd ever been elected, and I don't know when there'll be another.

I won't write about a subject unless I've mastered it.

Judges are the people who have to protect the rights of individuals, have to protect the rights of minorities, have to protect the rights in the Constitution, have to protect the requirement that the executive and the legislature not simply exercise raw power but adhere to standards of reasonableness and constitutionality.

I attack ideas. I don't attack people. And some very good people have some very bad ideas. And if you can't separate the two, you gotta get another day job. You don't want to be a judge. At least not a judge on a multi-member panel.

Power's not what the Constitution was about.

My excellent colleagues have forgotten these bitter lessons of history. The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime usually do. But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late. The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed only for those exceptionally rare circumstances when all other rights have failed. A free people can only afford to make this mistake once.

And if you take the cameras out of the courtroom, then you hide, I think, a certain measure of truth from the public, and I think that's very important for the American public to know.

The 1st Amendment protects the right to speak, not the right to spend.

Freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of achieving a free society.

The Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to bare the secrets of government and inform the people.

The task of dealing with global warming is urgent and important.