Quotes from Robert H. Jackson

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.

Men are more often bribed by their loyalties and ambitions than by money.

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.

It is not the function of government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.

It is hardly lack of due process for the Government to regulate that which it subsidizes.

We are not final because we are infallible, but infallible only because we are final.

The day that this country ceases to be free for irreligion it will cease to be free for religion - except for the sect that can win political power.

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.

Civil government cannot let any group ride roughshod over others simply because their consciences tell them to do so.

If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. [ West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette , 319 U.S. 624 (1943)]

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.

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.

The Constitution is not a suicide pact.

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.

Your job today tells me nothing of your future--your use of your leisure today tells me just what your tomorrow will be.

There was a time, in fact, I think the time of the first World War, when it could not have been said that war-inciting or war making was a crime in law, however reprehensible in morals. Of course, it was, under the law of all civilized peoples, a crime for one man with his bare knuckles to assault another. How did it come that multiplying this crime by a million, and adding fire arms to bare knuckles, made it a legally innocent act?

Of course, the idea that a state, any more than a corporation, commits crimes, is a fiction. Crimes always are committed only by persons. While it is quite proper to employ the fiction of responsibility of a state or corporation for the purpose of imposing a collective liability, it is quite intolerable to let such a legalism become the basis of personal immunity.

The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One s right to life liberty and property to free speech a free press freedom of worship and assembly and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote they depend on the outcome of no elections.

A]ny lawyer worth his salt will tell the suspect in no uncertain terms to make no statement to the police under any circumstances.

The matter does not appear to appear to me now as it appears to have appeared to me then.

Now, if any fundamental assumption underlies our system, it is that guilt is personal and not inheritable.

Men are more often bribed by their loyalties and ambitions than by money.

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.

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.