Court Quotes - page 54
The court had to be cleared owing to the roars of ribald laughter which greeted the appearance in the witness-box of the twelve red bearded dwarfs all in a heap. Their names were read out amid growing uproar. The names appeared to be: Sophus Barkayo-Tong, Amaninter Axling, Farjole Merrybody, Guttergorm Guttergormpton, Badly Oronparser, Churm Rincewind, Cleveland Zackhouse, Molonay Tubilderborst, Edeledel Edel, Scorpion de Rooftrouser, Listenis Youghaupt, Frums Gillygottle.
Beachcomber (writer)
In our forefathers' time...few books were read in our tongue, saving certain books of Chivalry...as one for example, Morte Arthure: the whole pleasure of which book standeth in two special points, in open manslaughter, and bold bawdry: In which book those be counted the noblest Knights, that do kill most men without any quarrel, and commit foulest adulteries by subtlest shifts...This is good stuff for wise men to laugh at, or honest men to take pleasure at. Yet I know, when God's Bible was banished the Court, and Morte Arthure received into the Prince's chamber.
Thomas Malory
The Brown case and the changes it brought causes many people to believe that it was the most important case of my tenure on the Court. That appraisal may be correct, but I have never thought so. It seemed to me that accolade should go to the case of Baker v. Carr (1962), which was the progenitor of the "one man, one vote" rule.
Earl Warren
Then the Quakers, five in number. Never was there such a rout. They had absolutely nothing to say. Every charge against Penn came out as clear as any case at the Old Bailey. They had nothing to urge but what was true enough, that he looked worse in my History than he would have looked on a general survey of his whole life. But that is not my fault. I wrote the History of four years during which he was exposed to great temptations; during which he was the favourite of a bad king, and an active solicitor in a most corrupt court. His character was injured by his associations. Ten years before, or ten years later, he would have made a much better figure. But was I to begin my book ten years earlier or ten years later for William Penn's sake? The Quakers were extremely civil. So was I. They complimented me on my courtesy and candour.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
We have no right to believe a thing true because everybody says so unless there are good grounds for believing that some one person at least has the means of knowing what is true, and is speaking the truth so far as he knows it. However many nations and generations of men are brought into the witness-box they cannot testify to anything which they do not know. Every man who has accepted the statement from somebody else, without himself testing and verifying it, is out of court; his word is worth nothing at all. And when we get back at last to the true birth and beginning of the statement, two serious questions must be disposed of in regard to him who first made it: was he mistaken in thinking that he knew about this matter, or was he lying?
William Kingdon Clifford
And had all the other orders of Hitler and Bormann -- there were a number of supplementary directives -- been carried out, millions of Germans who had escaped with their lives up to then might well have died. Speer tried to summarize for the Nurmeberg court the various "scorched earth" orders. To be destroyed he said were:.
William L. Shirer
[A written constitution] would replace the Crown in Parliament by a supreme court as the ultimate sovereign authority; for wherever there is a written constitution, the true sovereign in the state is that piece of paper, and its priesthood-the ultimate human sovereigns-are the judges who authoritatively interpret it... I am extremely doubtful if the people of Britain, when they discovered what was involved, would prefer to be governed instead by an unelected unrepresentative judiciary, or would be willing to dethrone the Crown in Parliament as their sovereign in order to install her Majesty's judges in the vacant space.
Enoch Powell
Although Baruch Spinoza is one of the great thinkers of the European philosophical tradition, he was not a professional scholar – he earned his modest living as a lens grinder. So, unlike many thinkers of his time, he was unconstrained by allegiance to a church, university or royal court. He was free to be faithful to the pursuit of truth. This gives his philosophy a remarkable originality and intellectual purity – and it also led to controversy and charges of heresy. In the 19th century, and perhaps even more recently, "Spinozist" was still a term of abuse among intellectuals. In a sense, Spinoza was always an outsider – and this independence is precisely what enabled him to see through the confusions, prejudices and superstitions that prevailed in the 17th century, and to gain a fresh and radical perspective on various philosophical and religious issues.
Baruch Spinoza
To us it seems that this difference, which Spinoza's thought constitutes in the history of Western metaphysics, represents an extremely high point of the theoretical development of modern thought. In other words, Spinoza's thought seems to us to represent a strategy for superseding the antinomies of bourgeois thought. But because bourgeois ideology is essentially based on antinomies, this supersession is a supersession tout court of the ideology. Spinoza gives us being in its immediateness. He destroys the homology between the mediations of articulations of being and the mediations and articulations of bourgeois Power. He presents us with the world as a territory of a joyous construction of immediate human needs.
Baruch Spinoza
The U.S. government directed, as Craig Murray so eloquently documented, the London prosecutor James Lewis. Lewis presented these directives to Baraitser. Baraitser adopted them as her legal decision. It was judicial pantomime. Lewis and the judge insisted they were not attempting to criminalize journalists and muzzle the press while they busily set up the legal framework to criminalize journalists and muzzle the press. And that is why the court worked so hard to mask the proceedings from the public, limiting access to the courtroom to a handful of observers and making it hard and at times impossible to access the trial online. It was a tawdry show trial, not an example of the best of English jurisprudence but the Lubyanka.
Julian Assange
To tempt, and to be tempted, are things very nearly allied, and, in spite of the finest maxims of morality impressed upon the mind, whenever feeling has anything to do in the matter, no sooner is it excited than we have already gone vastly farther than we are aware of, and I have yet to learn how it is possible to prevent its being excited.
Flight alone is, perhaps, the only remedy; but there are cases and circumstances in which flight becomes impossible, for how is it possible to fly, shun, or turn one's back in the midst of a court? The very attempt would give rise to remarks. Now, if you do not fly, there is nothing, it seems to me, so difficult as to escape from that which is essentially agreeable. All that can be said in opposition to it will appear but a prudery quite out of harmony with the natural instincts of the human heart; besides, no one holds his heart in his hand, tightening or relaxing his grasp of it at pleasure.
Catherine II of Russia
Professor Behe remarkably and unmistakably claims that the plausibility of the argument for ID [Intelligent Design] depends upon the extent to which one believes in the existence of God. As no evidence in the record indicates that any other scientific proposition's validity rests on belief in God, nor is the Court aware of any such scientific propositions, Professor Behe's assertion constitutes substantial evidence that in his view, as is commensurate with other prominent ID leaders, ID is a religious and not a scientific proposition.
Michael Behe
I've heard it said that the Constitution is perfect but that the politicians create problems by ignoring it. But if the Constitution can't make the politicians respect it, of what value is it? It's interesting to talk about, but not really useful to your freedom. For, in practice, the Constitution is whatever the President, the Congress, and the Supreme Court choose to think it is - and that may be considerably different from what you think it is.
Harry Browne
The Magnitsky legislation is a pale substitute for justice. The penalty for torture, murder, wrongful imprisonment or grand corruption should not be canceled vacations in Miami Beach or on the Côte d'Azur but a real trial in a real court of law. One day, this will be possible in Russia. For now, it is not, and targeted sanctions from Western democracies serve as the only mechanism of accountability for corrupt Kremlin officials and human rights abusers. I will continue this work, as I know will many of my colleagues, regardless of any legislative novelties from the Russian government.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Kara-Murza
It is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true; it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false. To admit that the false has any standing in court, that it ought to be handled gently because millions of morons cherish it and thousands of quacks make their livings propagating it-to admit this, as the more fatuous of the reconcilers of science and religion inevitably do, is to abandon a just cause to its enemies, cravenly and without excuse. It is, of course, quite true that there is a region in which science and religion do not conflict. That is the region of the unknowable.
H. L. Mencken
I think that it is high time for the United States Senate and its members to do some soul-searching - for us to weigh our consciences - on the manner in which we are performing our duty to the people of America - on the manner in which we are using or abusing our individual powers and privileges.
I think that it is high time that we remembered that we have sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution. I think that it is high time that we remembered that the Constitution, as amended, speaks not only of the freedom of speech but also of trial by jury instead of trial by accusation.
Whether it be a criminal prosecution in court or a character prosecution in the Senate, there is little practical distinction when the life of a person has been ruined.
Margaret Chase Smith
Professor Henry Holzer of the Brooklyn Law School believes that together the Belle Terre (1974) and Moore (1971) decisions stand for the proposition that it is a collectivist-statist ideology, not a concept of individual rights, that lies at the base of official government thinking about the family. Further, when the Court reviews state definitions of, or intrusions into, the family, "the determinative criterion will be the importance of the state interest involved." Riga concludes that in 15 years of Supreme Court cases ending in 1979, the view of marriage as an indissoluble lifelong commitment had been abandoned. In its wake is the perverted notion of liberty that each individual should be able to live out his sexual life in any way he chooses without interference from the state. The consequences of such thinking have been previously discussed, and ironically create the very problems that society now calls on the federal government to solve.
Bob McDonnell
