Robert H. Jackson > Quotes

“Civil government cannot let any group ride roughshod over others simply because their consciences tell them to do so.”
― Robert H. Jackson

“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)]”
― Robert H. Jackson

“Struggles to coerce uniformity of sentiment in support of some end thought essential to their time and country have been waged by many good as well as by evil men. Nationalism is a relatively recent phenomenon but at other times and places the ends have been racial or territorial security, support of a dynasty or regime, and particular plans for saving souls. As first and moderate methods to attain unity have failed, those bent on its accomplishment must resort to an ever-increasing severity. . . . Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.

It seems trite but necessary to say that the First Amendment to our Constitution was designed to avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings. There is no mysticism in the American concept of the State or of the nature or origin of its authority. 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.

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.”
― Robert H. Jackson

“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

“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

“The Constitution is not a suicide pact.”
― Robert H. Jackson

“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

“[A]ny lawyer worth his salt will tell the suspect in no uncertain terms to make no statement to the police under any circumstances.”
― Robert H. Jackson, You Have the Right to Remain Innocent

“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

“Now, if any fundamental assumption underlies our system, it is that guilt is personal and not inheritable.”
― Robert H. Jackson

“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?”
― Robert H. Jackson, The Case Against The Nazi War Criminals: Opening Statement for the United States of America.

“Men are more often bribed by their loyalties and ambitions than by money.”
― Robert H. Jackson

“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.”
― Robert H. Jackson, The Case Against The Nazi War Criminals: Opening Statement for the United States of America.

“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

“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.”
― Robert H. Jackson

“The matter does not appear to appear to me now as it appears to have appeared to me then.”
― Robert H. Jackson

“The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated. 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 ever has paid to Reason.”
― Robert H. Jackson

“But none of these men before you acted in minor parts. Each of them was entrusted with broad discretion and exercised great power. Their responsibility is correspondingly great and may not be shifted to that fictional being, “the State”, which cannot be produced for trial, cannot testify, and cannot be sentenced.”
― Robert H. Jackson, The Case Against The Nazi War Criminals: Opening Statement for the United States of America.

“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

“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, The Case Against The Nazi War Criminals: Opening Statement for the United States of America.

“There is a 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