See You in Court

Sunday, April 1, 2012 – See You in Court

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive. ~ Earl Warren

Justice is open to everyone in the same way as the Ritz Hotel. ~ Judge Sturgess

Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made. ~ John Godfrey Saxe

Justice is the tolerable accommodation of the conflicting interests of society, and I don’t believe there is any royal road to attain such accommodation concretely. ~Judge Learned Hand

An earthquake achieves what the law promises but does not in practice maintain – the equality of all men. ~ Ignazio Silone

This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Justice is incidental to law and order. ~ John Edgar Hoover

Justice may be blind, but she has very sophisticated listening devices. ~ Edgar Argo

Punishment is now unfashionable because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious. We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility. ~ Thomas Szasz

Any society that needs disclaimers has too many lawyers. ~ Erik Pepke

No man suffers injustice without learning, vaguely but surely, what justice is. ~ Isaac Rosenfeld

I’ve never had a problem with drugs. I’ve had problems with the police. ~ Keith Richards

There is plenty of law at the end of a nightstick. ~ Grover Whalen

In the Halls of Justice the only justice is in the halls. ~ Lenny Bruce

Although the legal and ethical definitions of right are the antithesis of each other, most writers use them as synonyms. They confuse power with goodness, and mistake law for justice. ~ Charles T. Sprading

It ain’t no sin if you crack a few laws now and then, just so long as you don’t break any. ~ Mae West

Law never made men a whit more just. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Only the man who has enough good in him to feel the justice of the penalty can be punished. ~ William Ernest Hocking

Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through. ~ Jonathan Swift, A Critical Essay upon the Faculties of the Mind, 1707

Capital punishment turns the state into a murderer. But imprisonment turns the state into a gay dungeon-master. ~ Jesse Jackson

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; it is justice that hurts. ~ H. L. Mencken

A criminal is a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation. ~ Howard Scott

As one reads history, not in the expurgated editions written for schoolboys and passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime. ~ Oscar Wilde

Having your fate rest in the hands of a jury is the same as entrusting yourself to surgery with a mentally retarded doctor. ~ Bill Messing

The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced. ~ Frank Zappa

Judge: a law student who marks his own papers. ~ H. L. Mencken

The law is an adroit mixture of customs that are beneficial to society, and could be followed even if no law existed, and others that are of advantage to a ruling minority, but harmful to the masses of men, and can be enforced on them only by terror. ~ Peter Kropotkin

It is hard to say whether doctors of law or divinity have made the greater advances in the lucrative business of mystery. ~ Edmund Burke

Every kind of peaceful cooperation among men is primarily based on mutual trust and only secondarily on institutions such as courts of justice and police. ~ Albert Einstein

The foolish and cruel notion that a wife is to obey her husband has sent more women to the grave than to the courts for a divorce. ~ Lemuel K. Washburn

Paper napkins never return from a laundry – nor love from a trip to the law courts. ~ John Barrymore

I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice. ~ Abraham Lincoln

In the state of nature, indeed, all men are born equal, but they cannot continue in this equality. Society makes them lose it, and they recover it only by the protection of the laws. ~ Charles de Montesquieu

Liberty, equality – bad principles! The only true principle for humanity is justice; and justice to the feeble is protection and kindness. ~ Henri-Frédéric Amiel

Under a government which imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Justice is like a train that is nearly always late. ~ Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Law in origin was merely a codification of the power of dominant groups, and did not aim at anything that to a modern man would appear to be justice. ~ Bertrand Russell

There is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience. It supersedes all other courts. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

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