Judges From The United States

"Who now shall accuse and arraign us? What man shall condemn and disown? Since Christ has said only the stainless Shall cast at his fellows a stone."

"O woman, born first to believe us; Yea, also born first to forget; Born first to betray and deceive us, Yet first to repent and regret!O first then in all that is human, Lo! first where the Nazarene trod, O woman! O beautiful woman! Be then first in the kingdom of God!"

""All honor to him who shall win the prize," The world has cried for a thousand years; But to him who tries, and who fails and dies, I give great honor and glory and tears.Give glory and honor and pitiful tears To all who fail in their deeds sublime; Their ghosts are many in the van of years, They were born with Time in advance of Time."

"Oh, great is the hero who wins a name, But greater many and many a time Some pale-faced fellow who dies in shame, And lets God finish the thought sublime.And great is the man with a sword undrawn, And good is the man who refrains from wine; But the man who fails and yet still fights on, Lo, he is the twin-born brother of mine."

"O star-built bridge, broad milky way! O star-lit, stately, splendid span! If but one star should cease to stay And prop its shoulders to God's plan — The man who lives for self, I say, He lives for neither God nor man."

"I count the columned waves at war With Titan elements; and they, In martial splendor, storm the bar And shake the world, these bits of spray."

"Almost his first words were, "Well, let us go and talk with the poets!" In vain I assured this untamed poet that the "Bards of San Francisco Bay," whom he had so naively saluted, had taken the vows of neither brotherhood nor sisterhood; that they feasted at no common board; flocked not; discoursed with no beaded rills; neither did their skilled hands sweep any strings whatever, and he must, therefore, listen in vain for the seraphic song."

"Hail, Columbia! happy land! Hail, ye heroes! heaven-born band! Who fought and bled in Freedom’s cause, Who fought and bled in Freedom’s cause, And when the storm of war was gone, Enjoyed the peace your valor won. Let independence be our boast, Ever mindful what it cost; Ever grateful for the prize, Let its altar reach the skies!"

"In retrospect, the reason for the assassination is hardly a mystery. It is now abundantly clear … why the C.I.A.'s covert operations element wanted John Kennedy out of the Oval Office and Lyndon Johnson in it. The new President elevated by rifle fire to control of our foreign policy had been one of the most enthusiastic American cold warriors.... Johnson had originally risen to power on the crest of the fulminating anti-communist crusade which marked American politics after World War II. Shortly after the end of that war, he declaimed that atomic power had become 'ours to use, either to Christianize the world or pulverize it' -- a Christian benediction if ever there was one. Johnson's demonstrated enthusiasm for American military intervention abroad … earned him the sobriquet 'the senator from the Pentagon...."

"Jim Garrison... the New Orleans DA was an elected official who did not just challenge the Warren Commission; he actually put together an alternative theory of Kennedy’s assassination. That theory created intense interest and attracted a public following...a serious problem for the MSM. The press had embraced the Warren Report, all 800 pages of it. Now came an accomplished District Attorney who was saying that their much-ballyhooed report on the death of President Kennedy was rubbish. By doing that, Garrison was not just upsetting the MSM’s apple cart, but also the FBI, the Secret Service and the White House. After all, they had all cooperated and worked for several months on this much anticipated report. Could they all have been so easily taken in by the Dallas Police? Or was there something else at work? Perhaps a deliberate cover-up? If so, why? What could be behind such an evil act and its elaborate concealment?"

"By raising these questions, Garrison was upsetting the establishment. Therefore, he was harshly attacked by all elements of the power structure. Almost no one in the media—except the LA Free Press, Ramparts and Playboy magazines—gave him a fair hearing. Every major newspaper, magazine, and TV network discounted or attacked him—none treated him fairly or even handedly. Elements of the government illegally spied on him, sent infiltrators into his camp, wired his office, tapped his phone, and launched subversive operations against his investigative efforts. (See William Davy, Let Justice be Done, Chapter 12) When Garrison complained about these actions, the MSM ignored him. Today, after the disclosures of the Assassination Records Review Board, they cannot be ignored. For the simple matter that the acts of subversion can now be proven with declassified documents."

"Before we introduced the testimony of our witnesses, we made them undergo independent verifying tests, including polygraph examination, truth serum and hypnosis. We thought this would be hailed as an unprecedented step in jurisprudence; instead, the press turned around and hinted that we had drugged our witnesses or given them posthypnotic suggestions to testify falsely."

"...Witnesses in this case do have a habit of dying at the most inconvenient times. I understand a London insurance firm has prepared an actuarial chart on the likelihood of 20 of the people involved in this case dying within three years of the assassination -- and found the odds 30 trillion to one. But I'm sure NBC will shortly discover that one of my investigators bribed the computer."

"I was burned so many times that I stopped giving interviews. In other words, if my words ended up in print, they were twisted in an indescribable fashion."

"To show you how cosmically irrelevant the Warren Report is for the most part … one of the exhibits is classified in the front as, 'A Study of the Teeth of Jack Ruby's Mother.' Even if Jack Ruby had intended to bite Oswald to death, that still would not have been relevant."

"Huey Long once said, 'Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.' I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."

"One of the stated objectives [of the Warren Commission] was to calm the fears of the people about a conspiracy. But in our country, the government has no right to calm our fears, any more than it has, for example, the right to excite our fears about Red China, or about fluoridation, or about birth control, or about anything. There's no room in America for thought control of any kind, no matter how benevolent the objective. Personally, I don't want to be calm about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I don't want to be calm about a president of my country being shot down in the streets."

"This is not the first time I've charged a person before I've made the case." — Jim Garrison [James Phelan, Scandals, Scamps, and Scoundrels."

"God sifted a whole nation that he might send choice grain over into this wilderness."

"Congress was right in not limiting, by its reconstruction acts, the right of suffrage to whites; but wrong in the exclusion from suffrage of certain classes of citizens and all unable to take its prescribed retrospective oath, and wrong also in the establishment of despotic military governments for the States and in authorizing military commissions for the trial of civilians in time of peace. There should have been as little military government as possible; no military commissions; no classes excluded from suffrage; and no oath except one of faithful obedience and support to the Constitution and laws, and of sincere attachment to the constitutional Government of the United States."

"The Constitution, in all its provisions, looks to an indestructible Union composed of indestructible States."

"The way to resumption is to resume."

"When Texas became one of the United States, she entered into an indissoluble relation. All the obligations of perpetual union, and all the guaranties of republican government in the Union, attached at once to the state. The Act which consummated her admission into the Union was something more than a compact; it was the incorporation of a new member into the political body. And it was final."

"True democracy makes no enquiry about the color of skin, or the place of nativity, whereever it sees man, it recognizes a being endowed by his Creator with original inalienable rights."

"No more slave States; no slave Territories."

"When Chase, Sumner, Stevens, and Wilson talk to the negro of the importance of having the franchise, and stop short of giving the franchise to woman, I proclaim them hypocrites—I proclaim them politicians. They speak so to the newly freed slave, because he has already the ballot in his hands, and they want him to vote for them. We have not that right, and hence they do not speak one word in favor of our attaining the elective franchise."

"All that they seem to say is 'nigger, nigger, nigger'."

"For, what is slavery? It is the complete and absolute subjection of one person to the control and disposal of another person, by legalized force. We need not argue that no person can be, rightfully, compelled to submit to such control and disposal. All such subjection must originate in force; and, private force not being strong enough to accomplish the purpose, public force, in the form of law, must lend its aid. The Government comes to the help of the individual slaveholder, and punishes resistance to his will, and compels submission. THE GOVERNMENT, therefore, in the case of every individual slave, is THE REAL ENSLAVER, depriving each person enslaved of all liberty and all property, and all that makes life dear, without imputation of crime or any legal process whatsoever. This is precisely what the Government of the United States is forbidden to do by the Constitution. The Government of the United States, therefore, cannot create or continue the relation of master and slave. Nor can that relation be created or continued in any place, district, or territory, over which the jurisdiction of the National Government is exclusive; for slavery cannot subsist a moment after the support of the public force has been withdrawn."

"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."

"Emerson said to him, "Young man, have you read Plato?" Holmes said he hadn't. "You must. You must read Plato. But you must hold him at arm's length and say, 'Plato, you have delighted and edified mankind for two thousand years. What have you to say to me?'" Holmes said, "That's the lesson of independence." So off he went and read Plato for a few moths or a year, and then wrote a piece doing in Mr. Plato in one of those ephemeral literary things at Harvard. He laid this, as it were, at the feet of Mr. Emerson and awaited the next morning's mail, hoping to get a warm appreciation from Emerson. And the next day and the next and the next — no sign of life. No acknowledgment from Mr. Emerson. Holmes didn't see him again for about a year. When he saw him, this, that, and the other thing was again talked about. Emerson said, "Oh, by the way, I read your piece on Plato. Holmes, when you strike at a king, you must kill him." Holmes said, "That was the second great lesson — humility.""

"Morals are three-quarters manners."

"I do take law very seriously, deeply seriously, because 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."

"The mode by which the inevitable is reached is effort."

"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."

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

"All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them."

"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."

"The words of the Constitution … are so unrestricted by their intrinsic meaning or by their history or by tradition or by prior decisions that they leave the individual Justice free, if indeed they do not compel him, to gather meaning not from reading the Constitution but from reading life."

"As a member of this court I am not justified in writing my private notions of policy into the Constitution, no matter how deeply I may cherish them or how mischievous I may deem their disregard."

"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."

"The eternal struggle in the law between constancy and change is largely a struggle between history and reason, between past reason and present needs."

"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."

"Appeal must be to an informed, civically militant electorate."

"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."

"Convictions following the admission into evidence of confessions which are involuntary, i.e., the product of coercion, either physical or psychological, cannot stand. This is so not because such confessions are unlikely to be true but because the methods used to extract them offend an underlying principle in the enforcement of our criminal law: that 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 charges against an accused out of his own mouth."

"No judge writes on a wholly clean slate."

"For the highest exercise of judicial duty is to subordinate one's personal pulls and one's private views to the law of which we are all guaradians - those impersonal convictions that made a society a civilized community, and not the victims of personal rule."

"In a democratic society like ours, relief must come through an aroused popular conscience that sears the conscience of the people's representatives."

"Congress is, after all, not a body of laymen unfamiliar with the commonplaces of our law. This legislation was the formulation of the two Judiciary Committees, all of whom are lawyers, and the Congress is predominately a lawyers' body."

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