Warren E. Burger Quotes

Doctors still retain a high degree of public confidence because they are perceived as healers. Should lawyers not be healers? Healers, not warriors? Healers, not procurers? Healers, not hired guns?

However, when the privilege depends solely on the broad, undifferentiated claim of public interest in the confidentiality of such conversations, a confrontation with other values arises.

Calculated risks of abuse are taken in order to preserve higher values.

The men who wrote the First Amendment religion clause did not view paid legislative chaplains and opening prayers as a violation of that amendment ... the practice of opening sessions with prayer has continued without interruption ever since that early session of Congress. It can hardly be thought that in the same week the members of the first Congress voted to appoint and pay a chaplain for each House and also voted to approve the draft of the First Amendment ... (that) they intended to forbid what they had just declared acceptable.

We may be well on our way to a society overrun by hordes of lawyers, hungry as locusts, and brigades of judges in numbers never before contemplated.

A far greater factor than abolishing poverty is the deterrent effect of swift and certain consequences: swift arrest, prompt trial, certain penalty and - at some point - finality of judgment.

Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. This is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.

The president's need for complete candor and objectivity from advisers calls for great deference from the courts.

Judges rule on the basis of law, not public opinion, and they should be totally indifferent to pressures of the times.

It is indeed an odd business that it has taken this Court nearly two centuries to 'discover' a constitutional mandate to have counsel at a preliminary hearing.

Free speech carries with it some freedom to listen.

History is filled with examples of men and women who rendered highly effective performance without the conventional badges of accomplishment in terms of certificates, diplomas, or degrees. Diplomas and tests are useful servants, but Congress has mandated the commonsense proposition that they are not to become masters of reality.

We may have lured judges into roaming at large in the constitutional field.

There can be no assumption that today's majority is 'right' and the Amish and others like them are 'wrong.' A way of life that is odd or even erratic but interferes with no rights or interests of others is not to be condemned because it is different.

It is not unprofessional to give free legal advice, but advertising that the first visit will be free is a bit like a fox telling chickens he will not bite them until they cross the threshold of the hen house.

To hold that the act of homosexual sodomy is somehow protected as a fundamental right would be to cast aside millennia of moral teaching.

There may be some incorrigible human beings who cannot be changed except by God's own mercy to that one person.

The trial of a case is a three-legged stool - a judge and two advocates.

Crime and the fear of crime have permeated the fabric of American life.

The policeman on the beat or in the patrol car makes more decisions and exercises broader discretion affecting the daily likes of people every day and to a greater extent, in many respects, than a judge will ordinarily exercise in a week.