Burton Hanson for Congress
GOP Primary - MN 3rd District
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Strength and Prosperity Through Peace
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Some of My Favorite Relevant Quotes
"As Professor Chafee remarked concerning the opposition to the appointment of Mr. Hughes as Chief Justice, it is less revealing to examine the list of clients in the nominee's office than to investigate the books in his library." Paul A. Freund, "Umpiring the Federal System," 54 Columbia L. Rev. 561, 574 (1954). Below are some of my favorite quotations on law, justice, government and politics. These quotations reflect some of my reading. I like to browse in used bookstores and often buy and read books that seemingly are on nonlegal topics. Reading all sorts of books is a good way to keep one's mind fresh and open. On the theory that all truth is related, I often find that something said in a book of poetry or letters or a novel or a book of psychology provides me with new metaphors for use in other areas.
"Fill the seats of justice with good [people], not so absolute in goodness as to forget what human frailty is...." Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd. I believe this applies as well to our representatives.
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"It is important not to give the appearance of a predisposed mind. And it is more important not to let the mind become predisposed." Felix Frankfurter, Of Law and Men viii. (1956).
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"So then, to every man his chance -- to every man, regardless of his birth, his shining, golden opportunity -- to every man the right to live, to work, to be himself, and to become whatever thing his manhood and his vision can combine to make him -- this, seeker, is the promise of America." Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again (published posthumously, 1940).
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Dueling quotes:
1) "Nobody on his deathbed ever said, 'I wish I had spent more time at the office.'" Paul Tsongas (1941-1997)
2) "Has she ever had to leave the courtroom because of a kid emergency? 'No, and I wouldn't do it,' she says....She continues, 'I think there are some jobs where you have to put the job first.'" Minnesota Federal District Court Judge Joan Erickson, quoted in "Judges named Joan," by Joan Oliver Goldsmith, Minnesota Law & Politics 58 (August-September 2002)
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"I told him it was law logic -- an artificial system of human reasoning, exclusively used in courts of justice, but good for nothing anywhere else." John Quincy Adams to John Marshall
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"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854). Some time ago, I was playing with this line in my mind, for no particular reason, when the following new line came to me: "The mass of judges lead lives of desperate moderation." A variant, applicable to most elected public officials, might be: "Most elected public officials live their lives desperately seeking to follow the quiet masses while pretending to be ahead of them."
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"It is a governing principle of nature, that the agency which can produce most good, when perverted from its proper aim, is most productive of evil. It behooves the well-intentioned, therefore, vigorously to watch the tendency of even their most highly prized institutions, since that which was established in the interests of the right, may so easily become the agent of the wrong." James Fenimore Cooper
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"To embarrass justice by a multiplicity of laws, or to hazard it by reliance on judges, are the opposite rocks on which all civil institutions have been wrecked." Johnson (engraved on wall of Minnesota State Capitol, right, outside the Supreme Court Courtroom)* * *
"Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step towards obtaining it." Henry David Thoreau
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"If you state a moral case to a plowman and a professor, the farmer will decide it as well, and often better, because he has not been led astray by any artificial rules." Thomas Jefferson
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"[L]aw [is] one of the most central of all the liberal arts. The law can be highly technical; it is obviously practical and professional in its applications. But it is also rooted in the most fundamental of all human inclinations: the desire to discover and bring reasonable and fair order into our lives and behavior. It is enmeshed with all those complicated impulses that make us want to estimate or judge things accurately, while simultaneously wanting to make due allowance for extenuating circumstances, for inevitable doubt, for the simple desire to pardon and forgive as well as to fix blame or seek retribution. In these and other ways, the law requires not only knowledge and the ability to reason or argue rigorously. It demands those other capacities -- not so easily categorized or taught -- as insight, intuition, wisdom, and courage. In short, it is intensely human, touching on everything that is essential to our lives, and quintessential to the liberal arts." Neil L. Rudenstine, President, Harvard University
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"The primary work of the appellate court is not creative or even particularly intellectual. The personal quality most required for the work is not intellect but care. Care is what is required to read tiresome transcripts and to listen to tedious arguments based on the details of the record in order to ascertain whether a trial judge has strayed from the true path of the law so far as to rest a decision on a clearly erroneous factual determination. Or whether an administrative agency has committed a substantial error 'on the whole record' before it. The importance of this work has been sadly underestimated. It is the essence of the idea of a government of law." Paul Carrington, "Ceremony and Realism: Demise of Appellate Procedures, 66 A.B.A. Bar J. 860 (1980). Care is a quality sadly underrated not just by judges but by our elected representatives. More care and better judgment would have kept us from invading Iraq. Now we're in a royal mess.
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"The vast majority are men of society. They live on the surface; they are interested in the transient and the fleeting; they are like driftwood on the flood. They ask forever and only the news, the froth and scum of the eternal sea. They use policy; they make up for want of matter with manner. They have many letters to write. Wealth and the approbation of men is to them success. The enterprises of society are something final and sufficing for them. The world advises them, and they listen to its advice. They live wholly an evanescent life, creatures of circumstance. It is of prime importance to them who is the president of the day." Henry David Thoreau, Journal 04.24.1852. And yet who is "president of the day" can make a big difference.
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"In the 18th century Alexander Pope could write: 'Of all those ills that mortal men endure/ How few are those the law can cause or cure.'...Consider the great issues of our time: war and peace, poverty and plenty, consumption and conservation of resources, ignorance and education, fear and security in our crowded cities. The law, and particularly judge-made law, can have only a limited impact on these issues....The law can give us freedom from governmental censorship of the press, but the quality of the press, its contribution to our understanding and our will, lies in larger measure with the press itself. Thus, responsibility rather than freedom of the press becomes the problematic factor. The same is true of those immensely powerful media, television and motion pictures." Paul A. Freund, "The Judicial Process in Civil Liberties Cases," 1975 U. Ill. L. F. 494
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"To make a government requires no great prudence....To give freedom is still more easy....But to form a free government; that is, to temper together these opposite elements of liberty and restraint in one consistent work, requires much thought...." Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
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"A wise old woman will make decisions in about the same way as a wise old man." The late, great Minnesota Supreme Court Justice, Mary Jeanne Coyne (quoted frequently by Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg)
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"Society is indeed a contract...a partnership.... As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born." Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
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"Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it. And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few; as we have learned to our sorrow. What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned, but has never quite forgotten; that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest." Learned Hand, The Spirit of Liberty 190 (1952)
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"'It is this backward motion toward the source,/ Against the stream, that most we see ourselves in,/ The tribute of the current to the source,/ It is from this in nature we are from./ It is most us." Robert Frost, "West-Running Brook"
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"Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem." Rollo May
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"Among politicians the esteem of religion is profitable; the principles of it are troublesome." Benjamin Whichcote
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"The peace and welfare of this and coming generations of Americans will be secure only as we cling to the watchword of true patriotism: 'Our country -- when right to be kept right; when wrong to be put right.'" Carl Schurz
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"The Democrats seem to be basically nicer people, but they have demonstrated time and again that they have the management skills of celery. They're the kind of people who'd stop to help you change a flat, but would somehow manage to set your car on fire. I would be reluctant to entrust them with a Cuisinart, let alone the economy. The Republicans, on the other hand, would know how to fix your tire, but they wouldn't bother to stop because they'd want to be on time for Ugly Pants Night at the country club." Dave Barry
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"Anyone that wants the presidency so much that he'll spend two years organizing and campaigning for it is not to be trusted with the office." David Broder
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"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies." Groucho Marx
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"There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose." John Kenneth Galbraith
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"Public opinion, I am sorry to say, will bear a great deal of nonsense. There is scarcely any absurdity so gross, whether in religion, politics, science or manners, which it will not bear." Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, -- entangling alliances with none; the support of the State governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns, and the surest bulwarks against anti-republican tendencies; the preservation of the general government in its whole constitutional vigour, as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad; …freedom of religion; freedom of the press; freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus; and trial by juries impartially selected, -- these principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us, and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation." Thomas Jefferson
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"I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all." Thomas Jefferson
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"More than all else I enjoy the sight of rebellion --of men who stand aside from parties...refuse to be labelled...the vast floating vote, ready to nip things in season, to cast their weight where most needed, at critical moments, with no formal pledge or party alliance." Walt Whitman
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"The artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state. The great artist is thus a solitary figure. He has, as [Robert] Frost said, 'a lover's quarrel with the world.' In pursuing his perceptions of reality, he must often sail against the currents of his time. This is not a popular role. If Robert Frost was much honored in his lifetime, it was because a good many preferred to ignore his darker truths. Yet in retrospect, we see how the artist's fidelity has strengthened the fibre of our national life. If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes him aware that our Nation falls short of its highest potential. I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist." Remarks at Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts, President John F. Kennedy on October 26, 1963, less than a month before his death.
Copyright (c) 2004 by Burton Randall Hanson. Prepared & published by candidate on his own behalf and at his own expense. Candidate may be reached by e-mail at burtonhanson@burtonhanson.com. Candidate does not solicit or accept contributions or endorsements.