Fortune Quote #3302

...what the ratifiers understood themselves to be enacting must be taken
to be what the public of that time would have understood the words to
mean. It is important to be clear about this. The search is not for a
subjective intention. If someone found a letter from George Washington to
Martha telling her that what he meant by the power to lay taxes was not
what other people meant, that would not change our reading of the
Constitution in the slightest. -- Judge Robert H. Bork

Fortune Quote #3301

I am not at liberty to discuss the justice of the Act. -- Justice
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Fortune Quote #3300

When we know what the source of the law has said that it shall be, our
authority is at an end. -- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes

Fortune Quote #3299

[My job is] to see that the game is played according to the rules whether
I like them or not. -- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes

Fortune Quote #3298

It is with almost melancholy nostalgia that we recall how only five years
ago it was possible to sustain a judgment of conviction entered in such a
clear case of unquestionable guilt and to accomplish it without undue
strain. -- Justice Roy L. Herdon of the California Court of Appeal,
1974

Fortune Quote #3297

There is a fundamental difference between a time when the great English
jurist Coke cringed as King James threatened to beat him physically with
his own hands... and a world in which the Supreme Court of the United
States could order President Nixon to turn over evidence to a special
prosecutor.... Centuries of struggle, sacrifice, and bloodshed went into
creating the ideal of a government of laws superior to any ruler or
political organ. -- Thomas Sowell

Fortune Quote #3296

To say that a shoe shine boy earns "too little" or a surgeon "too much" is
to say that third parties should have the right to preempt the decisions of
those who elected to spend their money on shoe shines or surgery.
-- Thomas Sowell

Fortune Quote #3295

To say that "wealth is so unfairly distributed in America," as Ronald
Dworkin does, is grossly misleading when most wealth in the United States
is not distributed AT ALL. People create it, earn it, save it, and spend
it. -- Thomas Sowell

Fortune Quote #3294

Many have argued that capitalism does not offer a satisfactory moral
message. But that is like saying that calculus does not contain
cabrohydrates, amino acids, or other essential nutrients. Everything fails
by irrevelant standards. -- Thomas Sowell

Fortune Quote #3293

Men have an all but incurable propensity to try to prejudge all the great
questions which interest them by stamping their prejudices on the
language. -- James Fitzjames Stephen