SamPratt.com

Don’t glory in death; glory in justice.

—Author unknown

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect on your position.

 — ATTRIBUTED TO MARK TWAIN (1835-1910)

When a village ceases to be a community, it becomes oppressive in its narrow conformity. So one becomes an individual and migrates to the city. There, finding others like-minded, one re-establishes a village community. Nowadays only New Yorkers are yokels.

 — PAUL GOODMAN (1911-1972)

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.

 — SUPREME COURT JUSTICE ROBERT A. JACKSON (1943)

Emergency does not create power. Emergency does not increase granted power or remove or diminish the restrictions imposed upon power granted or reserved. The Constitution was adopted in a period of grave emergency. Its grants of power to the federal government and its limitations of the power of the States were determined in the light of emergency, and they are not altered by emergency.

— CHIEF JUSTICE CHARLES EVANS HUGHES (1934)

The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to keep all the pieces.

— ATTRIBUTED TO EARLY ENVIRONMENTALIST ALDO LEOPOLD (1887-1948)

I should like, if time were longer and if I knew more than I do, to spend a whole lecture on the conception of vagueness. Vagueness is very much more important in the theory of knowledge than you would judge it to be from [most] writings. Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise, and everything precise is so remote from everything that we normally think, that you cannot for a moment suppose that is what we really mean when we say what we think. When you pass from the vague to the precise by the method of analysis and reflection that I am speaking of, you always run a certain risk of error.

– BERTRAND RUSSELL, FROM THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOGICAL ATOMISM (1918-19)