Great Throughts Treasury

"Future lawyers should be more aware that law is not a system of abstract logic, but the web of arrangements, rooted in history but also in hopes, for promoting to a maximum the full use of a nation's resources and talents."

"Government is itself an art, one of the subtlest of arts."

"Gratitude is one of the least articulate of the emotions, especially when it is deep. I can express with very limited adequacy the passionate devotion to this land that possesses millions of our people, born, like myself, under other skies, for the privilege that that this county has bestowed in allowing them to partake of its fellowship."

"Holmes said Emerson had a beautiful voice, and, of course, Holmes had one of the most beautiful voices the Lord ever put into a throat."

"I came into the world a Jew, and although I did not live my life entirely as a Jew, I think it is fitting that I should leave as a Jew. I don't want to turn my back on a great and noble heritage."

"I don't like a man to be too efficient. He's likely to be not human enough."

"I know of no title that I deem more honorable than that of Professor of the Harvard Law School."

"If one starts with the assumption that, in the absence of specific Congressional authority, a fixed rule of law precludes contracting officers from providing in a Government contract terms reasonably calculated to assure its performance even though there be no money loss through a particular default, there is no problem. But answers are not obtained by putting the wrong question and thereby begging the real one."

"If the function of this Court is to be essentially no different from that of a legislature, if the considerations governing constitutional construction are to be substantially those that underlie legislation, then indeed judges should not have life."

"In any event, mere speed is not a test of justice. Deliberate speed is. Deliberate speed takes time. But it is time well spent."

"In law also the emphasis makes the song."

"In the first place, lawyers better remember they are human beings, and a human being who hasn't his periods of doubts and distresses and disappointments must be a cabbage, not a human being. That is number one."

"In this Court dissents have gradually become majority opinions."

"Is that which was deemed to be of so fundamental a nature as to be written into the Constitution to endure for all times to be the sport of shifting winds of doctrine?"

"It has not been unknown that judges persist in error to avoid giving the appearance of weakness and vacillation."

"It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have been forged in controversies involving not very nice people."

"It is anomalous to hold that in order to convict a man the police cannot extract by force what is in his mind, but can extract what is in his stomach."

"It is not only under Nazi rule that police excesses are inimical to freedom. It is easy to make light of insistence on scrupulous regard for the safeguards of civil liberties when invoked on behalf of the unworthy. It is too easy. History bears testimony that by such disregard are the rights of liberty extinguished, heedlessly at first, then stealthily, and brazenly in the end."

"It is simply not true that war never settles anything."

"It is true of opinions as of other compositions that those who are seeped in them, whose ears are sensitive to literary nuances, whose antennae record subtle silences, can gather from their contents meaning beyond the words. All this presupposes, of course, a grasp of the nature of the Supreme Court's functions — the scope and limits of its constitutional authority — and often, as well, familiarity with the record and briefs of a particular case whose opinion record and briefs of a particular case whose opinion is under scrutiny."

"It was a wise man who said that there is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals."

"It would be a narrow conception of jurisprudence to confine the notion of 'laws' to what is found written on the statute books, and to disregard the gloss which life has written upon it."

"Judgment must take account of what it decrees for today in order that today may not paralyze tomorrow."

"Judicial judgment must take deep account ... of the day before yesterday in order that yesterday may not paralyze today."

"Lawyers better remember they are human beings, and a human being who hasn't his periods of doubts and distresses and disappointments must be a cabbage, not a human being. That is number one."

"Liberty of thought soon shrivels without freedom of expression. Nor can truth be pursued in an atmosphere hostile to the endeavor or under dangers which are hazarded only by heroes."

"Lincoln's appeal to "the better angels of our nature" failed to avert a fratricidal war. But the compassionate wisdom of Lincoln's first and second inaugurals bequeathed to the Union, cemented with blood, a moral heritage which, when drawn upon in times of stress and strife, is sure to find specific ways and means to surmount difficulties that may appear to be insurmountable."

"Litigation is the pursuit of practical ends, not a game of chess."

"Mere speed is not a test of justice. Deliberate speed is. Deliberate speed takes time. But it is time well spent."

"National unity is the basis of national security. To deny the legislature the right to select appropriate means for its attainment presents a totally different order of problem from that of the propriety of subordinating the possible ugliness of littered streets to the free expression opinion through handbills."

"No court can make time stand still."

"No judge writes on a wholly clean slate."

"Of compelling consideration is the fact that words acquire scope and function from the history of events which they summarize."

"One is entitled to say without qualification that the correlation between prior judicial experience and fitness for the Supreme Court is zero."

"Ours is an accusatorial and not an inquisitorial system – a system in which the state must establish guilt by evidence independently and freely secured and may not by coercion prove its charge against an accused out of his own mouth."

"The [Fifteenth] Amendment nullifies sophisticated as well as simple-minded modes of discrimination."

"The course of decision in this Court has thus far jealously enforced the principle of a free society secured by the prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures. Its safeguards are not to be worn away by a process of devitalizing interpretation."

"The Court's authority - possessed of neither the purse nor the sword -ultimately rests on substantial public confidence in its moral sanctions."

"The liberty of man to search for truth ought not to be fettered, no matter what orthodoxies he may challenge."

"The line must follow some direction of policy, whether rooted in logic or experience. Lines should not be drawn simply for the sake of drawing lines."

"The real rulers in Washington are invisible and exercise power from behind the scenes."

"The requirement of “due process” is not a fair-weather or timid assurance. It must be respected in periods of calm and in times of trouble; it protects aliens as well as citizens."

"The ultimate touchstone of constitutionality is the Constitution itself and not what we have said about it."

"Time and experience have forcefully taught that the power to inspect dwelling places, either as a matter of systematic area-by-area search or, as here, to treat a specific problem, is of indispensable importance in the maintenance of community health; a power that would be greatly hobbled by the blanket requirement of the safeguards necessary for a search of evidence of criminal acts."

"To be effective, judicial administration must not be leaden-footed."

"To pierce the curtain of the future, to give shape and visage to mysteries still in the womb of time, is the gift of the imagination. It requires poetic sensibilities with which judges are rarely endowed and which their education does not normally develop."

"To some lawyers, all facts are created equal"

"We forget that the most successful statesmen have been professionals. Lincoln was a professional politician."

"We have enjoyed so much freedom for so long that we are perhaps in danger of forgetting how much blood it cost to establish the Bill of Rights."

"What becomes decisive to a Justice's functioning on the Court in the large area within which his individuality moves is his general attitude toward law, the habits of the mind that he has formed or is capable of unforming, his capacity for detachment, his temperament or training for putting his passion behind his judgment instead of in front of it. The attitudes and qualities which I am groping to characterize are ingredients of what compendiously might be called dominating humility."