Laws should be interpreted in a liberal sense so that their intention may be preserved.

Even when laws have been written down, they ought not always to remain unaltered.

The law is reason, free from passion.

If you’re doing a biography, you try to stay as accurate as possible to reality. But you really don’t know what was going on in the person’s mind. You just know what was going on in the minds of people around him.

No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

You make a movie, and if somebody reads something into it, then great, more power to him.

I understood that with the swipe of my pen as a prosecutor, I would have the decision in my pen to make a decision about someone’s life.

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

I would not look to the U.S. Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in 2012.

Immigration laws are the only laws that are discussed in terms of how to help people who break them.

Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.

It is not Kafka’s fault that his wonderful writings have lately turned into a fad, and are read by people who have neither the ability nor the desire to absorb literature.

As soon as I hear a sound, it always suggests a mood to me.

There’s no one thing that is true. They’re all true.

Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning.

The right honourable gentleman caught the Whigs bathing, and walked away with their clothes. He has left them in the full enjoyment of their liberal positions, and he is himself a strict conservative of their garments.

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

The place of justice is a hallowed place.

I do hope that some of my dissents will one day be the law.

I’ve always been very liberal when it comes to people thinking for themselves.

When you draw or paint a tree, you do not imitate the tree; you do not copy it exactly as it is, which would be mere photography. To be free to paint a tree or a flower or a sunset, you have to feel what it conveys to you: the significance, the meaning of it.

Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that’s what the music is about.

Humans cannot avoid trying to influence others. Everything we say or do is examined and interpreted by others for clues as to our intentions.

I get very little sleep when the court is sitting.

It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.

And all who told it added something new, and all who heard it, made enlargements too.

How can one preach goodness and love to men without at the same time offering them an interpretation of the World that justifies this goodness and this love?

Law, without force, is impotent.

A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.

You don’t send people to prison on the basis of what other people imagine, or on the basis of media sound bites like ‚shooting an unarmed child,‘ when that ‚child‘ was beating him bloody.

No law or ordinance is mightier than understanding.

Law is always better than war.

I believe Karl Marx could have subscribed to the Sermon on the Mount.

Nobody is above the law. Imagine if there allegations against Modi and he is the Prime Minister. Should the case not be pursued just because he has become the PM. It should not be so that it should be stopped. I am not above the law.

It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.

Everyone assumes I practise all of my own laws but I don’t. I think anybody who did would be a horrible ugly person to be around.

I hope that a move toward clemency with Judge Afiuni would be a step towards the importance of maintaining a properly functioning justice system.

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

Like Cato, give his little senate laws, and sit attentive to his own applause.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

I entirely concur in the propriety of resorting to the sense in which the Constitution was accepted and ratified by the nation. In that sense alone it is the legitimate Constitution.

Due process should matter.

The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced.

A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.

Laws control the lesser man… Right conduct controls the greater one.

Laws, like houses, lean on one another.

I think members of the legislature, people who have to run for office, know the connection between money and influence on what laws get passed.

Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power; religion gives man wisdom which is control.

Woe to the makers of literal translations, who by rendering every word weaken the meaning! It is indeed by so doing that we can say the letter kills and the spirit gives life.

More law, less justice.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.

Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.

Just because you’ve seen ‚My Cousin Vinny‘ doesn’t qualify you to be a federal judge.

We think that the world is a solid, vivid place, full of shape and colour and solid objects like this table and this microphone and so on, but we actually create that in our heads out of the bits of information that hit the back of our eyeballs or hit our eardrums or hit our tongues or whatever.

When I would hear the rabbi tell about some miracle such as a bush whose leaves were shaking but there wasn’t any wind, I would try to fit the miracle into the real world and explain it in terms of natural phenomena.

I don’t like allegories.

When I was a young man, Dirac was my hero. He made a breakthrough, a new method of doing physics. He had the courage to simply guess at the form of an equation, the equation we now call the Dirac equation, and to try to interpret it afterwards.

The poets are only the interpreters of the gods.