Top 50 Courthouse Quotes & Sayings

When I get an idea for a book, something appeals to me, it's usually a character. I'll see a picture of a female marshal in front of the courthouse in Miami and she's got a shotgun on her hip and it goes up on an angle. And she's good-looking. And I say, 'I've got to use her.'

We were wearing jeans and t-shirts, and we just decided to drive to the courthouse and get married. We went to Arby's and had lunch - that's always been like one of my favorite places - so we decided to celebrate our holy matrimony with some roast beef.

The last possible deed is that which defines perception itself, an invisible golden chord that connects us: illegal dancing in the courthouse corridors.

The myth-making about Appomattox started from the moment Lee left the courthouse on his horse to travel to Richmond.

The construction of a courthouse is a long-term investment in a building where important public business is done. But that does not justify extravagant expenditures. Courthouses should be dignified, durable, and functional. They should not be grandiose, monumental, and luxurious.

I was a cub reporter on a local newspaper in Limerick city, and I used to cover the district court meetings. All of life passed through the Limerick courthouse. Misery, malevolence, the dark side of humanity... I tell ya, it made 'Angela's Ashes' look like 'The Wonderful World of Disney.'

The audience that storms the box-office of the theater to gain entrance to a sensational show is small and sleepy compared with the throng that crashes the courthouse door when something concerning real life and death is to be laid bare to the public.

When you look at the startling ruins of Nuremberg, you are looking at a result of the war. When you look at the prisoners on view in the courthouse, you are looking at 22 of the causes.

The six of us gathered at my house, and we walked to the polls. I'll never forget it. Not a Negro was on the streets, and when we got to the courthouse, the clerk said he wanted to talk with us. When we got into his office, some 15 or 20 armed white men surged in behind us - men I had grown up with, had played with.

Why does every black person in the movies have to play a servant? How about a black person walking up the steps of a courthouse carrying a briefcase?

I love the system. Let me tell you why. People love it... The people, by and large, have great respect for our law and our system... Why do you think they go to that courthouse instead of killing each other in the streets, taking the law into their own hands?

I don't think the trial practice is dead. But it is very ill. There are some days you could throw a hand grenade down the hall of the Harris County Courthouse and not hit anybody.

The storytelling tradition that you bring from the South, I don't know where it arose, but it's still there. You can't go to the feed store, or the country courthouse without running into storytellers.

The big guys, the big dogs, are going to own everything from the White House to the courthouse.

I'm proud to be an Oakie from Muskogee, a place where even squares can have a ball. We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse and white lightning's still the biggest thrill of all.

When Henry Hill [in Goodfellas] got arrested for the first time and Robert DeNiro met him at the courthouse and Henry Hill was really upset, 'cause he thought Robert DeNiro would be really mad at him. And DeNiro comes up to him and he gives him a $100 and he goes, "You got pinched. We all get pinched, but you did it right, you didn't say nothing."

This is a true story. The day after Reagan won, I was walking into the courthouse when someone said that they'd bet Reagan would appoint me U.S. attorney.

In my very early days as a journalist, as a cub reporter on a local newspaper, I used to cover the district courthouse in Limerick city - all human life passed through that establishment, and my time there remains a source of inspiration.

I was a ball boy for the Atlanta Falcons; I was a tax assessor - this was all in high school - I was an account assistant at the courthouse, and then I was a real estate assistant.

We got married drunk in Vegas . . . We dated for a year, and we got married at a drive-through chapel in a cab. [We thought] you have to go down to the courthouse and sign papers and stuff, so who knew? We were married, and apparently now that [Rob] is getting married for real, his lawyer dug up something.

Your flag flyin' over the courthouse Means certain things are set in stone. Who we are, what we'll do and what we won't

Mere access to the courthouse doors does not by itself assure a proper functioning of the adversary process.

Anyone who's had a shower and hasn't ingested illegal narcotics within a couple of days stands out on a bench in the courthouse.

I used to think that the image of the press in the 1940s - a bunch of guys in hats screaming on the courthouse steps - was all baloney. I used to say, 'I know reporters. We're not like that.' But we are.

In the early nineties, I was a cub reporter on a city newspaper in Limerick, and assigned to the courthouse there. One day, an old detective sergeant came and whispered to me in the press pit. He pointed out a young offender, a teenager who was up for stealing a car or something relatively minor, and said, 'See this kid? He'll kill.'

If U.S. Grant had been leading a team of baseball players, they'd have second guessed him all the way to the doorknob of the Appomattox Courthouse.

"I beseech ye in the bowels of Christ, think that ye may be mistaken." I should like to have that written over the portals of every church, every school, and every courthouse, and, may I say, of every legislative body in the United States. I should like to have every court begin, "I beseech ye in the bowels of Christ, think that we may be mistaken."

Community is not something you have, like pizza. Now is it something you can buy. It's a living organism based on a web of interdependencies- which is to say, a local economy. It expresses itself physically as connectedness, as buildings actively relating to each other, and to whatever public space exists, be it the street, or the courthouse or the village green.

I'm the kind of guy who'll go to a courthouse and get married, but for women, it's different. It means a lot to them.

What I have learned about museum buildings is that buildings have to have iconic presentations. The position of the art museum vis-a-vis other civic buildings needs to be hierarchal in the community. It has to be equal to the library and the courthouse.

My husband and I were married in May 2007 on a sprawling rent-a-ranch in the Texas Hill Country. On the drive from Houston, we'd stopped off for our marriage license in the former produce aisle of a Winn Dixie-turned-courthouse in San Marcos and from there drove off the grid.

Around the courthouse when defense lawyers are chatting about their cases, the only question they ask each other is can you put your guy on the stand? Those conversations always assume the defendant is guilty. The question is just about the degree of difficulty in presenting a defense.

I found out long ago that the place where the law is apt to be abused the most is right around a courthouse.

In Paris there are two dens, one for thieves, the other for murderers. The den of thieves is the Stock Exchange; the den of murderers is the Courthouse.

Somewhere "out there," beyond the walls of the courthouse, run currents and tides of public opinion which lap at the courtroom door.

First it was the whites, and then their Negro message bearers. And the word was always the same: 'Tell your sons to take their names off the books. Don't show up at the courthouse voting day.'

A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.

Back in East Texas, all three networks have stations in my hometown of Tyler, and for a town that small, 85,000, to have all three networks, they all have their own news programs, six and 10, and they're always looking for news. Back when I was a judge, they were constantly coming to the courthouse and asking for comments.

In Selma, Alabama, in 1965, only 2.1 percent of blacks of voting age were registered to vote. The only place you could attempt to register was to go down to the courthouse. You had to pass a so-called literacy test. And they would tell people over and over again that they didn't or couldn't pass the literacy test.

The real reason that we can’t have the Ten Commandments in a courthouse: You cannot post “Thou shalt not steal,” “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” and “Thou shalt not lie” in a building full of lawyers, judges, and politicians. It creates a hostile work environment.

If I were a person of color in Florida, I would pick up a brick and start walking toward that courthouse in Sanford. Those that do not, those that hold the pain and betrayal inside and somehow manage to resist violence - these citizens are testament to a stoic tolerance that is more than the rest of us deserve. I confess, their patience and patriotism is well beyond my own.

About five, six FBI agents walked into the courthouse and arrested me. They said I was being arrested for distribution of information related to explosives over the Internet.

If confirmed, [Judge of the Supreme Court] will write the words that will either broaden or narrow our rights for the rest of your working life. You will be interpreting the Constitution in which we as a people place our faith and on which our freedoms as a nation rest. And on a daily basis, the words of your opinions will affect countless individuals as they seek protection behind the courthouse doors.

Yet far from putting any meaningful constraints on law enforcement in this war, the U.S. Supreme Court has given the police license to stop and search just about anyone, in any public place, without a shred of evidence of criminal activity, and it has also closed the courthouse doors to claims of racial bias at every stage of the judicial process from stops and searches to plea bargaining and sentencing.

I went downtown to the courthouse pretty late at night, and arraignment court was on. You have these prosecutors and public defenders and judges and all of these people who are there on a Friday night at half past 12, and how can you expect people to bring their judgment and their best selves to their work at that kind of time?

I hiked around town, the air sweet and dry, and was sort of overwhelmed by the perfection of it -- the old courthouse, the train depot, Mount [Jumbo] and Mount Sentinel rising up, the neon bars, the funky festivity of a college town .

My journey started in the courthouse and went to the statehouse.

All over Montana, you can walk into a bar, a café or even a school or a courthouse and just listen for a while as people talk to each other. And you will hear somebody, before very long, say something outrageously racist.

I love getting into the basement of a courthouse, and all the dusty records - all that stuff makes me really happy.

It was the 31st of August in 1962 that eighteen of us traveled twenty-six miles to the county courthouse in Indianola to try to register to become first-class citizens. We was met in Indianola by policemen, Highway Patrolmen, and they only allowed two of us in to take the literacy test at the time.