Lawyers From The United States

"In 1912 President William H. Taft declared: "The day is not far distant when three Stars and Stripes at three equidistant points will mark our territory: one at the North Pole, another at the Panama Canal, and the third at the South Pole. The whole hemisphere will be ours in fact as, by virtue of our superiority of race, it already is ours morally. " Taft said that the correct path of justice in U.S. foreign policy "may well be made to include active intervention to secure for our merchandise and our capitalists opportunity for profitable investment."

"Taft was cheerful, friendly, a typical hail-fellow-well-met with an infectious chuckle. Always popular, he had many friends but, surprisingly, few intimates. "One of the astonishing things about Taft's four years in the White House," wrote biographer Henry F. Pringle, "was the almost total lack of men, related or otherwise, upon whom he could lean... For the most part he faced his troubles alone." He was not happy as President. The break with his predecessor and former mentor, Theodore Roosevelt, weighed heavily on his mind; he was often irritable, depressed, at least once in tears. He regained his good spirits in retirement and as chief justice."

"One advantage possessed by Mr. Taft over Mr. Hughes is that Mr. Taft is able to cover more ground—especially when sitting down."

"The year 1908 saw the election of the first U.S. president to successfully weigh more than three hundred pounds, William Howard Taft, who ran on a platform of reinforced concrete and who, in a stirring inauguration speech, called for "a bacon cheeseburger and a side order of fries." Another important occurrence in the Taft administration was the famous Ballinger-Pinchot affair, which is truly one of the most fascinating and bizarre episodes in the nation's history, although it is quite frankly none of your business. (Especially the part about the dwarf goat.)"

"No tendency is quite so strong in human nature as the desire to lay down rules of conduct for other people."

"Some men are graduated from college cum laude, some are graduated summa cum laude, and some are graduated mirabile dictu."

"Enthusiasm for a cause sometimes warps judgment."

"Presidents come and go, but the Supreme Court goes on forever."

"The publishers profess to be the agents of heaven in establishing virtue and therefore that they ought to receive some subsidy from the government. I can ask no stronger refutation to this claim … than the utterly unscrupulous methods pursued by them in seeking to influence Congress on this subject."

"Don't worry over what the newspapers say. I don't. Why should anyone else? I told the truth to the newspaper correspondents - but when you tell the truth to them they are at sea."

"I'll be damned if I am not getting tired of this. It seems to be the profession of a President simply to hear other people talk."

"Politics, when I am in it, makes me sick."

"If I run as the regular Republican nominee, I may go down to defeat if a bolt is started by Roosevelt, but I will retain the regular organization of the party as a nucleus about which the conservative people who are in favor of maintaining constitutional government can gather, both from the Democratic and Republican parties, and we will have two radicals and one conservative."

"The President cannot make clouds to rain and cannot make the corn to grow, he cannot make business good; although when these things occur, political parties do claim some credit for the good things that have happened in this way."

"Substantial progress toward better things can rarely be taken with out developing new evils requiring new remedies."

"Presidents may go to the seashore or to the mountains. Cabinet officers may go about the country explaining how fortunate the country is in having such an administration, but the machinery at Washington continues to operate under the army of faithful non-commissioned officers, and the great mass of governmental business is uninterrupted."

"We live in a stage of politics, where legislators seem to regard the passage of laws as much more important than the results of their enforcement."

"The world is not going to be saved by legislation."

"The truth is that in my present life I don’t remember that I ever was president."

"It is important, of course, that controversies be settled right, but there are many civil questions which arise between individuals in which it is not so important the controversy be settled one way or another as that it be settled. Of course a settlement of a controversy on a fundamentally wrong principle of law is greatly to be deplored, but there must of necessity be many rules governing the relations between members of the same society that are more important in that their establishment creates a known rule of action than that they proceed on one principle or another. Delay works always for the man with the longest purse."

"Anti-Semitism is a noxious weed that should be cut out. It has no place in America."

"There is only one thing I wast to say about Ohio that has a political tinge, and that is that I think a mistake has been made of recent years in Ohio in failing to continue as our representatives the same people term after term. I do not need to tell a Washington audience, among whom there are certainly some who have been interested in legislation, that length of service in the House and in the Senate is what gives influence."

"It is one of the deepest wounds that I have had as an American and a lover of the Constitution and a believer in progressive conservatism, that such a man as Brandeis could be put on the Court."

"There is nothing so despicable as a secret society that is based upon religious prejudice and that will attempt to defeat a man because of his religious beliefs. Such a society is like a cockroach — it thrives in the dark. So do those who combine for such an end."

"Socialism proposes no adequate substitute for the motive of enlightened selfishness that to-day is at the basis of all human labor and effort, enterprise and new activity."

"Next to the right of liberty, the right of property is the most important individual right guaranteed by the Constitution and the one which, united with that of personal liberty, has contributed more to the growth of civilization than any other institution established by the human race."

"The diplomacy of the present administration has sought to respond to modern ideas of commercial intercourse. This policy has been characterized as substituting dollars for bullets. It is one that appeals alike to idealistic humanitarian sentiments, to the dictates of sound policy and strategy, and to legitimate commercial aims."

"The intoxication of power rapidly sobers off in the knowledge of its restrictions and under the prompt reminder of an ever-present and not always considerate press, as well as the kindly suggestions that not infrequently come from Congress."

"I love judges, and I love courts. They are my ideals, that typify on earth what we shall meet hereafter in heaven under a just God."

"One of the marvelous things about him is that he is strong enough to force the men who dislike him the most to stand by him. By far he is the strongest man before the people to-day except Roosevelt. I think his greatest fault is his failure to accord credit to anyone for what he may have done. This is a great weakness in any man. I think it was one of the strongest things about Roosevelt. He never tried to minimize what other people did and often exaggerated it."

"I am in favor of helping the prosperity of all countries because, when we are all prosperous, the trade of each becomes more valuable to the other."

"I have come to the conclusion that the major part of the work of a President is to increase the gate receipts of expositions and fairs and bring tourists to town."

"We are all imperfect. We can not expect perfect government."

"If humor be the safety of our race, then it is due largely to the infusion into the American people of the Irish brain."

"The welfare of the farmer is vital to that of the whole country."

"I am a Unitarian. I believe in God. I do not believe in the divinity of Christ, and there are many postulates of the orthodox creed to which I cannot subscribe."

"The President so fully represents his party, which secures political power by its promise to the people, and the whole government is so identified in the minds of the people with his personality that they make him responsible for all the sins of omission and of commission of society at large. This would be ludicrous if it did not have sometimes serious results. The President cannot make clouds to rain and cannot make the corn to grow, he cannot make business good; although when these things occur, political parties do claim some credit for the things that have happened in this way. He has no power of state legislation, which covers a very wide field and which comes in many respects much closer to the happiness of the people than the Federal Government."

"The difference is, this time, we win."

"You could make a good case that the history of social life is about the history of the technology of memory. That social order and control, structure of governance, social cohesion in states or organizations larger than face-to- face society depends on the nature of the technology of memory--both how it works and what it remembers... In short, what societies value is what they memorize, and how they memorize it, and who has access to its memorized form determines the structure of power that the society represents and acts from."

"The Entertainment Industry on Planet Earth had decided that in order to acquire Layer 7 Data Security, it was necessary to lock up layers 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 so that no technological progress could occur without their permission. This was known by the IT Industry and the Consumer Electronics Industry on the planet to be offensive nonsense, but there was no counterweight to it, and there was no organised consumer dissent sufficient to require them to stand up for technical merit and their own right to run their own businesses without dictation from companies a tenth their size. Not surprisingly, since it is part of the role we play in this political power concentrated in poverty, humility, and sanctity, we brought them to a consensus they were unable to bring themselves to - which is represented in the license by a rule which fundamentally says "If you want to experiment with locking down layer below 7 in the pursuit of data networks inside businesses that keep the business's data at home, you may do so freely, we have no objection - not only do we have no objection to you doing it, we've no objection to your using our parts to do it with. But when you use our parts to build machines which control peoples' daily lives - which provide them with education and culture, build devices which are modifiable by them to the same extent that they're modifiable by you. That's all we want. If you can modify the device after you give it to them, then they must be able to modify the device after you give it to them - that's a price for using our parts. That's a deal which has been accepted."

"I think Larry is right to notice that the contradictions are catching the allies up already. It's one of those cases where even before you begin bombing the children, the coalition is falling apart. And that's good news. And I'm very much in favor of it. Some Powell or other is messing up the war."

"We are a non-utopian political movement. We are not interested in going nowhere. We are not interested in going to some place we have never been, which we will get to after the revolution because people will be different. The crucial operating premise of the Free Software Movement as a revolutionary politic is: Proof of Concept plus Running code. Here. We did it already. It's sort of working. If you take a copy and help us fix it, it could really be something. Here. You want it? Take it. We like it. It's Free."

"The great moral question of the twenty-first century is this: if all knowledge, all culture, all art, all useful information can be costlessly given to everyone at the same price that it is given to anyone; if everyone can have everything, anywhere, all the time, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone?"

"Donald Ball and Wendell H. McCulloch, Jr., International Business: Introduction and Essentials, 5th ed. (Homewood, IL: Richard Irwin, 1993), p. 368."

"To quarrel over the past is to lose the future."

"Never have so few owed so much to so many."

"We need imagination in programming, not sterility; creativity, not imitation; experimentation, not conformity; excellence, not mediocrity. Television is filled with creative, imaginative people. You must strive to set them free."

"What do we mean by "the public interest?" Some say the public interest is merely what interests the public. I disagree."

"When television is good, nothing--not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers--nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit and-loss sheet or rating book to distract you--and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland."

"I'm only interested in virile men. That's why I'm not attracted to you."