Top 46 Robert H. Jackson Quotes
#1. Government of limited power need not be anemic government. Assurance that rights are secure tends to diminish fear and jealousy of strong government, and by making us feel safe to live under it makes for its better support.
Robert H. Jackson
#2. The very purpose of a bill of rights is to withdraw certain subjects from ... political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities.
Robert H. Jackson
#3. 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
#4. The priceless heritage of our society is the unrestricted constitutional right of each member to think as he will. Thought control is a copyright of totalitarianism, and we have no claim to it.
Robert H. Jackson
#5. Any court which undertakes by its legal processes to enforce civil liberties needs the support of an enlightened and vigorous public opinion which will be intelligent and discriminating as to what cases really are civil liberties cases and what questions really are involved in those cases.
Robert H. Jackson
#6. But the validity of a doctrine does not depend on whose ox it gores.
Robert H. Jackson
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. In this court the parties changed positions as nimbly as if dancing a quadrille.
Robert H. Jackson
#10. We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it ... No grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy.
Robert H. Jackson
#11. The most odious of all oppressions are those which mask as justice.
Robert H. Jackson
#12. Civil government cannot let any group ride roughshod over others simply because their consciences tell them to do so.
Robert H. Jackson
#13. I cannot subscribe to the perverted reasoning that society may advance and strengthen the rule of law by the expenditure of morally innocent lives but that progress in the law may never be made at the price of morally guilty lives.
Robert H. Jackson
#14. Now, if any fundamental assumption underlies our system, it is that guilt is personal and not inheritable.
Robert H. Jackson
#15. I cannot say that our country could have no secret police without becoming totalitarian, but I can say with great conviction that it cannot become totalitarian without a centralized national police.
Robert H. Jackson
#16. 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
#17. Our forefathers found the evils of free thinking more to be endured than the evils of inquest or suppression. This is because thoughtful, bold and independent minds are essential to the wise and considered self-government.
Robert H. Jackson
#18. The power of citizenship as a shield against oppression was widely known from the example of Paul 's Roman citizenship, which sent the centurion scurrying to his higher-ups with the message: "Take heed what thou doest: for this man is a Roman".
Robert H. Jackson
#19. 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
#20. Education should be a lifelong process, the formal period serving as a foundation on which life's structure may rest and rise.
Robert H. Jackson
#21. The duty to disclose knowledge of crime rests upon all citizens.
Robert H. Jackson
#22. One's right to life, liberty, and property depends on the outcome of no election.
Robert H. Jackson
#23. The office of the lawyer ... is too delicate, personal and confident to be occupied by a corporation.
Robert H. Jackson
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.
Robert H. Jackson
#27. It is not the function of our 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
#28. The German organized plundering, planned it, disciplined it, and made it official just as he organized everything else, and then he compiled the most meticulous records to show that he had done the best job of looting that was possible under the circumstances. And we have those records.
Robert H. Jackson
#29. 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
#30. It is hardly lack of due process for the Government to regulate that which it subsidizes.
Robert H. Jackson
#32. Due process requires some definite link, some minimum connection, between a state and the person, property or transaction it seeks to tax.
Robert H. Jackson
#33. While the Nation has forbidden monopoly by one set of laws it has been creating them by another. Patent laws, valuable as they may be in some respects, often father monopoly.
Robert H. Jackson
#34. In our country are evangelists and zealots of many different political, economic and religious persuasions whose fanatical conviction is that all thought is divinely classified into two kinds - that which is their own and that which is false and dangerous.
Robert H. Jackson
#35. The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.
Robert H. Jackson
#36. The matter does not appear to appear to me now as it appears to have appeared to me then.
Robert H. Jackson
#37. 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
#39. I see no reason why I should be consciously wrong today because I was unconsciously wrong yesterday.
Robert H. Jackson
#40. Intellectual freedom means the right to re-examine much that has been long taken for granted. A free man must be a reasoning man, and he must dare doubt what a legislative or electoral majority may most passionately assert.
Robert H. Jackson
#41. The mere state of being without funds is a neutral fact constitutionally an irrelevance, like race, creed, or color.
Robert H. Jackson
#42. A person gets from a symbol the meaning he puts into it, and what is one man's comfort and inspiration is another's jest and scorn.
Robert H. Jackson
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. Your job today tells me nothing of your future
your use of your leisure today tells me just what your tomorrow will be.
Robert H. Jackson
#46. There is no such thing as an achieved liberty: like electricity, there can be no substantial storage and it must be generated as it is enjoyed, or the lightsgto out.
Robert H. Jackson
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