Ethics and Morality

Great cases like hard cases make bad law. For cases are called great, not by reason of their real importance in shaping the law of the future, but because of some accident of immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings and distorts the judgment. These immediate interests exercise a kind of hydraulic pressure which makes what previously was clear seem doubtful, and before which even well settled principles of law will bend.

 

The remoter and more general aspects of the law are those which give it universal interest. It is through them that you not only become a great master in your calling, but connect your subject with the universe and catch an echo of the infinite, a glimpse of its unfathomable process, a hint of the universal law.

 

It is revolting to have no better reason for a rule of law than that so it was laid down in the time of Henry IV. It is still more revolting if the grounds upon which it was laid down have vanished long since, and the rule simply persists from blind imitation of the past.

 

If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which such knowledge enables him to predict, not as a good one, who finds his reasons for conduct, whether inside the law or outside of it, in the vaguer sanctions of conscience.

 

The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law.

 

The external and immediate result of an advocate’s work is but to win or lose a case. But remotely what the lawyer does is to establish, develop, or illuminate rules which are to govern the conduct of men for centuries; to set in motion principles and influences which shape the thought and action of generations which know not by whose command they move.

 

The law, wherein, as in a magic mirror, we see reflected, not only our own lives, but the lives of all men that have been!

 

Vengeance imports a feeling of blame, and an opinion, however distorted by passion, that a wrong has been done. It can hardly go very far beyond the case of a harm intentionally inflicted: even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.

 

The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed.

 

America is never wholly herself unless she is engaged in high moral purpose. We as a people have such a purpose today. It is to make kinder the face of the nation and gentler the face of the world.

 

To crush, to annihilate a man utterly, to inflict on him the most terrible of punishments so that the most ferocious murderer would shudder at it and dread it beforehand, one need only give him work of an absolutely, completely useless and irrational character.

I don’t believe the Devil would give half as much for the services of a sinner as he would for those of one of these folks that are always doing virtuous acts in a way to make them unpleasing.

The absence of vices adds so little to the sum of one’s virtues.

We should render a service to a friend to bind him closer to us, and to an enemy in order to make a friend of him.

It is fairly obvious that those who are in favor of the death penalty have more affinity with assassins than those who are not.

The printing-press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, one sometimes forgets which.

The preacher’s garment is cut according to the pattern of that of the hearers, for the most part.

Poverty comes pleading, not for charity, for the most part, but imploring us to find a purchaser for its unmarketable wares.

Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly; they are still .entangled with the desire for ownership.

It is perfectly easy to be original by violating the laws of decency and the canons of good taste.

After the great destructions / Everyone will prove that he was innocent.

We give to necessity the praise of virtue.

Our system of morality is a body'of imperfect social generalizations expressed in terms of emotion.

Man becomes man only by the intelligence, but he is man only by the heart.