Robert H. Jackson

(1892-1954)

United States Attorney General (1940 - 1941) and an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court (1941 - 1954). He was also the chief United States prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials.

• "We can afford no liberties with liberty itself."
• "Men are more often bribed by their loyalties and ambitions than by money."
• "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."
• "We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it. And we must not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes of the war, for our position is that no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy."
• "If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein."
• "When the [United States Supreme] Court moved to Washington in 1800, it was provided with no books, which probably accounts for the high quality of early opinions.
• "It is not the function of the government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error."
• "We are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final."
• "I used to say that, as Solicitor General, I made three arguments in every case. First came the one I had planned – as I thought, logical, coherent, complete. Second was the one actually presented – interrupted, incoherent, disjointed, disappointing. The third was the utterly devastating argument that I thought of after going to bed that night…"
• "Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard."