Robert H. Jackson Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“It is not the function of government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.”
-- Robert H. Jackson -
“Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.”
-- Robert H. Jackson -
“The day that this country ceases to be free for irreligion it will cease to be free for religion - except for the sect that can win political power.”
-- Robert H. Jackson -
“The most odious of all oppressions are those which mask as justice.”
-- Robert H. Jackson -
“I used to say that, as Solicitor General, I made three arguments of every case. First came the one that I planned-as I thought, logical, coherent, complete. Second was the one actually presented-interrupted, incoherent, disjointed, disappointing. The third was the utterly devastating argument that I thought of after going to bed that night.”
-- Robert H. Jackson -
“Freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.”
-- Robert H. Jackson -
“If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.”
-- Robert H. Jackson -
“When the Supreme Court moved to Washington in 1800, it was provided with no books, which probably accounts for the high quality of early opinions.”
-- Robert H. Jackson -
“Men are more often bribed by their loyalties and ambitions than by money.”
-- Robert H. Jackson -
“The price of freedom of religion or of speech or of the press is that we must put up with, and even pay for, a good deal of rubbish.”
-- Robert H. Jackson -
“The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power.”
-- Robert H. Jackson -
“Particularly when the war power is invoked to do things to the liberties of people, or to their property or economy that only indirectly affect conduct of the war and do not relate to the engagement of the war itself, the constitutional basis should be scrutinized with care. ... I would not be willing to hold that war powers may be indefinitely prolonged merely by keeping legally alive a state of war that had in fact ended. I cannot accept the argument that war powers last as long as the effects and consequences of war for if so they are permanent -- as permanent as the war debts.”
-- Robert H. Jackson -
“We are not final because we are infallible, but infallible only because we are final.”
-- Robert H. Jackson -
“Perhaps you have heard about the college executives who were discussing what they wanted to do after retirement age. One hoped to run a prison or school of correction so that the alumni would never come back to visit. Another chose to manage an orphan asylum so that he would not be plagued with advice from parents.”
-- Robert H. Jackson -
“This Court is forever adding new stories to the temples of constitutional law, and the temples have a way of collapsing when one story too many is added.”
-- Robert H. Jackson -
“It is only the words of the bill that have presidential approval, where that approval is given. It is not to be supposed that in signing a bill the President endorses the whole Congressional Record.”
-- Robert H. Jackson -
“The Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact.”
-- Robert H. Jackson -
“I do not know whether it is the view of the Court that a judge must be thick-skinned or just thick-headed, but nothing in my experience or observation confirms the idea that he is insensitive to publicity. Who does not prefer good to ill report of his work? And if fame a good public name is, as Milton said, the "last infirmity of noble mind", it is frequently the first infirmity of a mediocre one.”
-- Robert H. Jackson -
“The physical power to get the money does not seem to me a test of the right to tax. Might does not make right even in taxation. To hold that what the use of official authority may get the state may keep, and that if it cannot get hold of a nonresident stockholder it may hold the company as hostage for him, is strange constitutional doctrine to me.”
-- Robert H. Jackson -
“The mere state of being without funds is a neutral fact constitutionally an irrelevance, like race, creed, or color.”
-- Robert H. Jackson -
“It is hardly lack of due process for the Government to regulate that which it subsidizes.”
-- Robert H. Jackson -
“It is possible to hold a faith with enough confidence to believe that what should be rendered to God does not need to be decided and collected by Caesar.”
-- Robert H. Jackson -
“Had the jury convicted on proper instructions it would be the end of the matter. But juries are not bound by what seems inescapable logic to judges.”
-- Robert H. Jackson -
“Of course, such judicial misconstruction theoretically can be cured by constitutional amendment. But the period of gestation of a constitutional amendment, or of any law reform, is reckoned in decades usually; in years, at least. And, after all, as the Court itself asserted in overruling the minimum-wage cases, it may not be the Constitution that was at fault.”
-- Robert H. Jackson -
“Reversal by a higher court is not proof that justice is thereby better done. There is no doubt that if there were a super-Supreme Court, a substantial proportion of our reversals of state courts would also be reversed. We are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final.”
-- Robert H. Jackson -
“But an escape less self-depreciating was taken by Lord Westbury, who, it is said, rebuffed a barrister's reliance upon an earlier opinion of his Lordship: "I can only say that I am amazed that a man of my intelligence should have been guilty of giving such an opinion". If there are other ways of gracefully and good-naturedly surrendering former views to a better considered position, I invoke them all.”
-- Robert H. Jackson -
“Not every defeat of authority is a gain for individual freedom, nor every judicial rescue of a convict a victory for liberty.”
-- Robert H. Jackson -
“Our people do not want barren theories from their democracy. Maury Maverick has expressed very quaintly, but clearly, what they really want when he says: 'We Americans want to talk, pray, think as we please and eat regular'.”
-- Robert H. Jackson -
“If we can cultivate in the world the idea that aggressive war-making is the way to the prisoner's dock rather than the way to honors, we will have accomplished something toward making the peace more secure.”
-- Robert H. Jackson -
“We set up government by consent of the governed, and the Bill of Rights denies those in power any legal opportunity to coerce that consent. Authority here is to be controlled by public opinion, not public opinion by authority.”
-- Robert H. Jackson
