Quotes by Jurists - Page 2

A great man is different from an eminent one in that he is ready to be the servant of the society.
B.R. Ambedkar
I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
A man who called everyone a damn fool is like a man who damns the weather. He only shows that he is not adapted to his environment, not that the environment is wrong.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
We believed that it was most desirable that the North should win, we believed in the principle that the Union is indissoluable, we, or many of us at least, also believed that the conflict was inevitable, and that slavery had lasted long enough. But we equally believed that those who stood against us held just as sacred conviction that were the opposite of ours, and we respected them as every men with a heart must respect those who give all for their belief.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Certitude leads to violence. This is a proposition that has an easy application and a difficult one. The easy application is to ideoologues, dogmatists, and bullies--people who think that their rigtness justifies them in imposing on anyone who does not happen to suscribe to their particular ideology, dogma or notion of turf. If the conviction of rightness is powerful enough, resistance to it will be met, sooner or later by force. There are people like this in every sphere of life, and it is natural to feel that the world would be a better place without them!
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
In the Hindu religion, one can[not] have freedom of speech. A Hindu must surrender his freedom of speech. He must act according to the Vedas. If the Vedas do not support the actions, instructions must be sought from the Smritis, and if the Smritis fail to provide any such instructions, he must follow in the footsteps of the great men. He is not supposed to reason. Hence, so long as you are in the Hindu religion, you cannot expect to have freedom of thought
B.R. Ambedkar
Why should not a writer be permitted to make use of the levers of fear, terror and horror because some feeble soul here and there finds it more than it can bear? Shall there be no strong meat at table because there happen to be some guests there whose stomachs are weak, or who have spoiled their own digestions?
E.T.A. Hoffmann
For a successful revolution it is not enough that there is discontent. What is required is a profound and thorough conviction of the justice, necessity and importance of political and social rights.
B.R. Ambedkar
The fantastic advances in the field of electronic communication constitute a greater danger to the privacy of the individual.
Earl Warren
Indifferentism is the worst kind of disease that can affect people.
B.R. Ambedkar
Though, I was born a Hindu, I solemnly assure you that I will not die as a Hindu
B.R. Ambedkar
Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defea
William O. Douglas
If I find the constitution being misused, I shall be the first to burn it.
B.R. Ambedkar
A bitter thing cannot be made sweet. The taste of anything can be changed. But poison cannot be changed into nectar.
B.R. Ambedkar
If there is a dark and hostile power, laying its treacherous toils within us, by which it holds us fast and draws us along the path of peril and destruction, which we should not otherwise have trod; if, I say there is such a power, it must form itself inside us and out of ourselves, indeed; it must become identical with ourselves. For it is only in this condition that we can believe in it, and grant it the room which it requires to accomplish its secret work. Now, if we have a mind which is sufficiently firm, sufficiently strengthened by the joy of life, always to recognize this strange enemy as such, and calmly to follow the path of our own inclination and calling, then the dark power will fail in its attempt to gain a form that shall be a reflection of ourselves.
E.T.A. Hoffmann
They (the blacks) had no right which the white man was bound to respect.
Roger B. Taney
I have never heard anyone profess indifference to a boat race. Why should you row a boat race? Why endure long months of pain in preparation of a fierce half hour, or even six minutes, that will leave you all but dead? Does anyone ask the question? Is there anyone who would not go through all its costs, and more, for the moment when anguish breaks into triumph - or even for the glory of having nobly lost? Is life less than a boat race? If a man will give all the blood in his body to win the one, will he not spend all the might of his soul to prevail in the other?
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Don't write so that you can be understood, write so that you can't be misunderstood.
William Howard Taft
We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep to the real and the true.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
It is a considerable point in all good legislation to determine exactly the credibility of witnesses and the proofs of a crime. Every reasonable man, everyone, that is, whose ideas have a certain interconnection and whose feelings accord with those of other men, may be a witness. The true measure of his credibility is nothing other than his interest in telling or not telling the truth; for this reason it is frivolous to insist that women are too weak [to be good witnesses], childish to insist that civil death in a condemned man has the same effects as a real death, and meaningless to insist on the infamy of the infamous, when they have no interest in lying.
Cesare Beccaria
The great thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are going.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Not to know certain things is a great part of wisdom.
Hugo Grotius
For a man's home is his castle.
Sir Edward Coke
Academic life is but half life it is a withdrawal from the fight to utter smart things that cost you nothing except the thinking them from a cloister.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalized medium of reason that's all we have standing between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled undisciplined feeling.
Felix Frankfurter
When rogues fall out honest men get into their own.
Sir Matthew Hale
Live as if you already are what you wish to become.
William Jones
Slavery does not merely mean a legalised form of subjection. It means a state of society in which some men are forced to accept from others the purposes which control their conduct.
B.R. Ambedkar
It simply is not true that war never settles anything.
Felix Frankfurter
In truth, I am nothing but a plodding mediocrity — please observe, a plodding mediocrity — for a mere mediocrity does not go very far, but a plodding one gets quite a distance. There is joy in that success, and a distinction can come from courage, fidelity and industry.
Benjamin N. Cardozo
As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air – however slight – lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.
William O. Douglas
That the king can do no wrong is a necessary and fundamental principle of the English constitution.
Sir William Blackstone
The basic idea underlying religion is to create an atmosphere for the spiritual development of the individual.
B.R. Ambedkar
The teachings of Buddha are eternal, but even then Buddha did not proclaim them to be infallible. The religion of Buddha has the capacity to change according to times, a quality which no other religion can claim to have...Now what is the basis of Buddhism? If you study carefully, you will see that Buddhism is based on reason. There is an element of flexibility inherent in it, which is not found in any other religion.
B.R. Ambedkar
For every crime that comes before him, a judge is required to complete a perfect syllogism in which the major premise must be the general law; the minor, the action that conforms or does not conform to the law; and the conclusion, acquittal or punishment. If the judge were constrained, or if he desired to frame even a single additional syllogism, the door would thereby be opened to uncertainty.
Cesare Beccaria
Old friends are best. King James used to call for his old shoes they were the easiest for his feet.
John Selden
Time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary.
Sir William Blackstone
Men are more often bribed by their loyalties and ambitions than by money.
Robert H. Jackson
Democracy is not merely a form of Government. It is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. It is essentially an attitude of respect and reverence towards our fellow men.
B.R. Ambedkar
These examples and many others demonstrate an alarming trend whereby the privacy and dignity of our citizens is being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen -- a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of man's life at
William O. Douglas
Once the government can demand of a publisher the names of the purchasers of his publications, the free press as we know it disappears. Then the spectre of a government agent will look over the shoulder of everyone who reads. The purchase of a book or pamphlet today may result in a subpoena tomorrow. Fear of criticism goes with every person into the bookstall. The subtle, imponderable pressures of the orthodox lay hold. Some will fear to read what is unpopular, what the powers-that-be dislike. When the light of publicity may reach any student, any teacher, inquiry will be discouraged. The books and pamphlets that are critical of the administration, that preach an unpopular policy in domestic or foreign affairs, that are in disrepute in the orthodox school of thought will be suspect and subject to investigation. The press and its readers will pay a heavy price in harassment. But that will be minor in comparison with the menace of the shadow which government will cast over literature that does not follow the dominant party line. If the lady from Toledo can be required to disclose what she read yesterday and what she will read tomorrow, fear will take the place of freedom in the libraries, book stores, and homes of the land. Through the harassment of hearings, investigations, reports, and subpoenas government will hold a club over speech and over the p
William O. Douglas
We are what we believe we are.
Benjamin N. Cardozo
Unless education promotes character making, unless it helps men to be more moral, more just to their fellows, more law abiding, more discriminatingly patriotic and public spirited, it is not worth the trouble taken to furnish it.
William Howard Taft
Life should be great rather than long.
B.R. Ambedkar
So long as you do not achieve social liberty, whatever freedom is provided by the law is of no avail to you.
B.R. Ambedkar
I said that I have finished telling my story, not that the story is finished. I said before that no story is ever really finished, each one is part of a longer story and consists of smaller stories, some of which are told, others passed over in silence. And whenever you tell any one of the stories, whether you intend it or not, you include the shadow of all the others. The result is that once you have told one story, once you have undone the meshes of the net at one point, you are trapped. You are compelled to go on with the story. And because we ourselves, like all life, are stories, we become the story of the stories.
Herbert Rosendorfer
if one of two or more joint wrongdoers has to pay all the damages, he cannot recover contribution from his fellows.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
I measure the progress of a community by the degree of progress which women have achieved.
B.R. Ambedkar
religion is for man and not man for religion
B.R. Ambedkar
happy is the nation without a history
Cesare Beccaria
The American government is premised on the theory that if the individual man is to be free, his ideas, his beliefs, his ideology, his philosophy, must be placed beyond the reach of government.
William O. Douglas
A man never knows exactly how the child of his brain will strike other people.
William Howard Taft
The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all fre
William O. Douglas
Judges are but men and are swayed like other men by vehement prejudices. This is corruption in reality give it whatever other name you please.
David Dudley Field
Equality may be a fiction but nonetheless one must accept it as a governing principle.
B.R. Ambedkar
Some men are graduated from college cum laude some are graduated summa cum laude and some are graduated mirabile dictu.
William Howard Taft
History shows that where ethics and economics come in conflict, victory is always with economics. Vested interests have never been known to have willingly divested themselves unless there was sufficient force to compel them.
B.R. Ambedkar
There are... otherwise quite decent people who are so dull of nature that they believe that they must attribute the swift flight of fancy to some illness of the psyche, and thus it happens that this or that writer is said to create not other than while imbibing intoxicating drink or that his fantasies are the result of overexcited nerves and resulting fever. But who can fail to know that, while a state of psychical excitement caused by the one or other stimulant may indeed generate some lucky and brilliant ideas, it can never produce a well-founded, substantial work of art that requires the utmost presence of mind.
E.T.A. Hoffmann
The Hindus criticise the Mahomedans for having spread their religion by the use of the sword. They also ridicule Christianity on the score of the Inquisition. But really speaking, who is better and more worthy of our respect—the Mahomedans and Christians who attempted to thrust down the throats of unwilling persons what they regarded as necessary for their salvation, or the Hindu who would not spread the light, who would endeavour to keep others in darkness, who would not consent to share his intellectual and social inheritance with those who are ready and willing to make it a part of their own make-up? I have no hesitation in saying that if the Mahomedan has been cruel, the Hindu has been mean; and meanness is worse than cruelty.
B.R. Ambedkar
Justice has always evoked ideas of equality, of proportion of compensation. Equity signifies equality. Rules and regulations, right and righteousness are concerned with equality in value.If all men are equal, then all men are of the same essence, and the common essence entitles them of the same fundamental rights and equal liberty... In short justice is another name of liberty, equality and fraternity.
B.R. Ambedkar