Top 50 Robert H. Jackson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Education should be a lifelong process, the formal period serving as a foundation on which life’s structure may rest and rise.”

— Robert H. Jackson

2. “Microbes are doing things we didn’t even know they could do 10 years ago.”

— Robert H. Jackson

3. “We are not final because we are infallible, but infallible only because we are final.”

— Robert H. Jackson

4. “I see no reason why I should be consciously wrong today because I was unconsciously wrong yesterday.”

— Robert H. Jackson

5. “The most odious of all oppressions are those which mask as justice.”

— Robert H. Jackson

6. “One’s right to life, liberty, and property depends on the outcome of no election.”

— Robert H. Jackson

7. “Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.”

— Robert H. Jackson

8. “The price of freedom of religion or of speech or of the press is that we must put up with, and even pay for, a good deal of rubbish.”

— Robert H. Jackson

9. “The Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact.”

— Robert H. Jackson

10. “To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds.”

— Robert H. Jackson

11. “This Court is forever adding new stories to the temples of constitutional law, and the temples have a way of collapsing when one story too many is added.”

— Robert H. Jackson

12. “Intellectual freedom means the right to re-examine much that has been long taken for granted. A free man must be a reasoning man, and he must dare doubt what a legislative or electoral majority may most passionately assert.”

— Robert H. Jackson

13. “The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy. One’s right to life, liberty and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly may not be submitted to vote; they depend on no elections.”

— Robert H. Jackson

14. “The matter does not appear to appear to me now as it appears to have appeared to me then.”

— Robert H. Jackson

15. “We set up government by consent of the governed, and the Bill of Rights denies those in power any legal opportunity to coerce that consent. Authority here is to be controlled by public opinion, not public opinion by authority.”

— Robert H. Jackson

16. “The places that are most likely to grow trees for carbon sequestration are places where trees aren’t growing now.”

— Robert H. Jackson

17. “In this court the parties changed positions as nimbly as if dancing a quadrille.”

— Robert H. Jackson

18. “A person gets from a symbol the meaning he puts into it, and what is one man’s comfort and inspiration is another’s jest and scorn.”

— Robert H. Jackson

19. “Freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.”

— Robert H. Jackson

20. “It is not the function of government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.”

— Robert H. Jackson

21. “If we can cultivate in the world the idea that aggressive war-making is the way to the prisoner’s dock rather than the way to honors, we will have accomplished something toward making the peace more secure.”

— Robert H. Jackson

22. “In our country are evangelists and zealots of many different political, economic and religious persuasions whose fanatical conviction is that all thought is divinely classified into two kinds – that which is their own and that which is false and dangerous.”

— Robert H. Jackson

23. “Civil government cannot let any group ride roughshod over others simply because their consciences tell them to do so.”

— Robert H. Jackson

24. “Your job today tells me nothing of your future – your use of your leisure today tells me just what your tomorrow will be.”

— Robert H. Jackson

25. “We can afford no liberties with liberty itself.”

— Robert H. Jackson

26. “The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power.”

— Robert H. Jackson

27. “That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.”

— Robert H. Jackson

28. “The duty to disclose knowledge of crime rests upon all citizens.”

— Robert H. Jackson

29. “There is a danger that, if the Court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.”

— Robert H. Jackson

30. “I cannot say that our country could have no secret police without becoming totalitarian, but I can say with great conviction that it cannot become totalitarian without a centralized national police.”

— Robert H. Jackson

31. “Our forefathers found the evils of free thinking more to be endured than the evils of inquest or suppression. This is because thoughtful, bold and independent minds are essential to the wise and considered self-government.”

— Robert H. Jackson

32. “Government of limited power need not be anemic government. Assurance that rights are secure tends to diminish fear and jealousy of strong government, and by making us feel safe to live under it makes for its better support.”

— Robert H. Jackson

33. “There is no such thing as an achieved liberty: like electricity, there can be no substantial storage and it must be generated as it is enjoyed, or the lightsgto out.”

— Robert H. Jackson

34. “The priceless heritage of our society is the unrestricted constitutional right of each member to think as he will. Thought control is a copyright of totalitarianism, and we have no claim to it.”

— Robert H. Jackson

35. “Men are more often bribed by their loyalties and ambitions than by money.”

— Robert H. Jackson

36. “It is hardly lack of due process for the Government to regulate that which it subsidizes.”

— Robert H. Jackson

37. “The petitioner’s problem is to avoid Scylla without being drawn into Charybdis.”

— Robert H. Jackson

38. “The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.”

— Robert H. Jackson

39. “Due process requires some definite link, some minimum connection, between a state and the person, property or transaction it seeks to tax.”

— Robert H. Jackson

40. “The mere state of being without funds is a neutral fact constitutionally an irrelevance, like race, creed, or color.”

— Robert H. Jackson

41. “I cannot subscribe to the perverted reasoning that society may advance and strengthen the rule of law by the expenditure of morally innocent lives but that progress in the law may never be made at the price of morally guilty lives.”

— Robert H. Jackson

42. “The day that this country ceases to be free for irreligion it will cease to be free for religion – except for the sect that can win political power.”

— Robert H. Jackson

43. “If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.”

— Robert H. Jackson

44. “It is only the words of the bill that have presidential approval, where that approval is given. It is not to be supposed that in signing a bill the President endorses the whole Congressional Record.”

— Robert H. Jackson

45. “Had the jury convicted on proper instructions it would be the end of the matter. But juries are not bound by what seems inescapable logic to judges.”

— Robert H. Jackson

46. “While the Nation has forbidden monopoly by one set of laws it has been creating them by another. Patent laws, valuable as they may be in some respects, often father monopoly.”

— Robert H. Jackson

47. “But the validity of a doctrine does not depend on whose ox it gores.”

— Robert H. Jackson

48. “Not every defeat of authority is a gain for individual freedom, nor every judicial rescue of a convict a victory for liberty.”

— Robert H. Jackson

49. “Now, if any fundamental assumption underlies our system, it is that guilt is personal and not inheritable.”

— Robert H. Jackson

50. “It is possible to hold a faith with enough confidence to believe that what should be rendered to God does not need to be decided and collected by Caesar.”

— Robert H. Jackson