It is an honourable thing to be merciful to the vanquished.
What is it that makes us trust our judges? Their independence in office and manner of appointment.
My gift of John Marshall to the people of the United States was the proudest act of my life. There is no act of my life on which I reflect with more pleasure. I have given to my country a judge equal to a Hole, Holt, or a Mansfield.
Whether a law be void for its repugnancy to the Constitution, is, at all times, a question of much delicacy, which out seldom, if ever, to be decided in the affirmative, in doubtful case. . . . But it is not on slight implication and vague conjecture that the legislature is to be pronounced to have transcended its powers, and its acts to be considered as void. The opposition between the Constitution and the law should be such that the judge feels a clear and strong conviction of their incompatibility with each other.
Certainly all those who have framed written constitutions contemplate them as forming the fundamental and paramount law of the nation, and consequently the theory of every such government must be, that an act of the legislature, repugnant to the constitution, is void.
The acme of judicial distinction means the ability to look a lawyer straight in the eyes for two hours and not hear a damned word he says.
It is the peculiar province of the legislature to prescribe general rules for the government of society; the application of those rules to individuals in society would seem to be the duty of other departments.
. . . the life of the mind is reality, and love without romantic illumination is a spiritless matter.
Jesus was a community organizer, Pontius Pilate was a governor. And perhaps they should understand the role of a community organizer is to help people in distress.
It is not his business to argue men into faith, for that cannot be done; but it is his business to demonstrate the intellectual adequacy of the biblical faith and the comparative inadequacy of its rivals, and to show the invalidity of the criticisms that are brought against it. This he seeks to do, not from any motive of intellectual self-justification, but for the glory of God and His gospel.
To hate destructiveness, one must hate life as well: only death is an image of undistorted life. . . organic life is an illness peculiar to our unlovely planet.