How accurately can the law fix the crime? There has to be a mechanism for very fast action. The law is like this: catch them and punish them.

For any young democracy, the most difficult but important step is burying the legacy of tyranny and establishing an economy and a government and institutions that abide by the rule of law. Every country faces challenges to the rule of law, including my own.

Freedom is a man’s natural power of doing what he pleases, so far as he is not prevented by force or law.

I’ve had two cancer bouts in my years on the Court, and the first one, Justice O’Connor told me, ‚Now, you do the chemotherapy on Friday because you’ll get over it during the weekend and you can be back in court on Monday.‘

Abortion isn’t a lesser evil, it’s a crime. Taking one life to save another, that’s what the Mafia does. It’s a crime. It’s an absolute evil.

I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation and is but a reflection of human frailty.

Shame may restrain what law does not prohibit.

The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.

A Bill of Rights is what the people are entitled to against every government, and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.

Some may remember, if you have good memories, that there used to be a concept in Anglo-American law called a presumption of innocence, innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Now that’s so deep in history that there’s no point even bringing it up, but it did once exist.

Taste cannot be controlled by law.

The jury consist of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.

And so I would not enforce a law that would reject people and turn them away without giving them a fair and due process to determine if we should give them asylum and refuge.

I have always fought for concrete facts, for justice.

If a man had more than one life, I think a little hanging would not hurt this one; but after he is once dead, we cannot bring him back, no matter how sorry we may be; so the boy shall be pardoned.

The bells will ring and the marriages will begin. And it’s a great day in our state for equal protection under the law for all people.

All virtue is summed up in dealing justly.

Foolish men imagine that because judgment for an evil thing is delayed, there is no justice; but only accident here below. Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two, some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as death.

The unforgivable crime is soft hitting. Do not hit at all if it can be avoided; but never hit softly.

Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.

Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.

I favor the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and it must be enforced at gunpoint if necessary.

Justice is an unassailable fortress, built on the brow of a mountain which cannot be overthrown by the violence of torrents, nor demolished by the force of armies.

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.

Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable… Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.

The policemen or soldiers are only a gun in the establishments hand. They make the racist secure in his racism.

It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do.

To live outside the law, you must be honest.

It is impossible to suffer without making someone pay for it; every complaint already contains revenge.

Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.

Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more a man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.

Charity begins at home, and justice begins next door.

If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers.

We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.

There is but one law for all, namely that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity – the law of nature and of nations.

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.

America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense human rights invented America.

The equal right of all citizens to health, education, work, food, security, culture, science, and wellbeing – that is, the same rights we proclaimed when we began our struggle, in addition to those which emerge from our dreams of justice and equality for all inhabitants of our world – is what I wish for all.

It is a fundamental principle of criminal law that an imputed offense must correspond exactly to the type of crime described by law. If no law applies exactly to the point in question, then there is no offense.

The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.

The act of policing is, in order to punish less often, to punish more severely.

Over the course of my career in law enforcement, I have witnessed over and over again the selflessness and sacrifice of law enforcement who lay their lives on the line every day to protect people who they will never meet and people who will never know their names.

Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing.

And whether you’re an honest man, or whether you’re a thief, depends on whose solicitor has given me my brief.

Nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced.

Justice is sweet and musical; but injustice is harsh and discordant.

There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.

If you see oppression of the poor, and justice and righteousness trampled in a country, do not be astounded.

No true believer could be intolerant or a persecutor. If I were a magistrate and the law carried the death penalty against atheists, I would begin by sending to the stake whoever denounced another.

It’s annoying, but justice and equality are mates. Aren’t they? Justice always wants to hang out with equality. And equality is a real pain.

It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society.

It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.

The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists who are dedicated to justice, peace and brotherhood.

Lawless are they that make their wills their law.

Celebrity is the chastisement of merit and the punishment of talent.

A man who is good enough to shed his blood for the country is good enough to be given a square deal afterwards.

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

To know the laws is not to memorize their letter but to grasp their full force and meaning.

What has happened at Guantanamo Bay… does not represent the will of the American people. I’m embarrassed about it, I think its wrong. I think it does give terrorists an unwarranted excuse to use the despicable means to hurt innocent people.

I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.

Arizona presents no specific reason for excepting capital defendants from the constitutional protections extended to defendants generally, and none is readily apparent.