57 Quotes by Robert H. Jackson

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

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

One’s right to life, liberty, and property depends on the outcome of no election.

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?

I see no reason why I should be consciously wrong today because I was unconsciously wrong yesterday.

The Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact.

To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds.

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.

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.