Judicial Reasoning Quotes

Continued reliance on preemption analysis suppresses judicial attention to the discrimination and equality concerns that should be motivating courts' consideration of subfederal immigration regulations. ~ Pratheepan Gulasekaram

The Qur'an sought to reform, not to destroy and start from scratch, to
salvage what was useful and then to modify and build on it. The task was
to get the Arabs to think about religion in a novel way, to inculcate in them a new conceptual frame of reference, to transfer them from one worldview to another, and higher, one. This process of transformation took them from traditionalism to individualism, from impulsiveness to discipline, from supernaturalism to science, from intuition to conscious reasoning and, in the end, ideally, harmonized the whole. ~ Jeffrey Lang

And in the same spirit should each person receive what we say: for the man of education will seek exactness so far in each subject as the nature of the thing admits, it being plainly much the same absurdity to put up with a mathematician who tries to persuade instead of proving, and to demand strict demonstrative reasoning of a Rhetorician. ~ Aristotle.

The best road to correct reasoning is by physical science; the way to trace effects to causes is through physical science; the only corrective, therefore, of superstition is physical science. ~ Frances Wright

In the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, there appears a remarkable
quotation attributed to Michael Welfare, one of the founders of a
religious sect known as the Dunkers and a longtime acquaintance of
Franklin. the statement had its origins in Welfare's complaint to
Franklin that zealots of other religious persuasions were spreading lies
about the Dunkers, accusing them of abominable principles to which, in
fact, they were utter strangers. Franklin suggested that such abuse
might be diminished if the Dunkers published the articles of their
belief and the rules of their discipline. Welfare replied that this
course of action had been discussed among his co-religionists but had
been rejected. He then explained their reasoning in the following
words:
When we were first drawn together as a society, it had pleased God to
enlighten our minds so far as to see that some doctrines, which we once
esteemed truths, were errors, and that others, which we had esteemed
errors, were real truths. From time to time He has been pleased to
afford us farther light, and our principles have been improving, and our
errors diminishing. Now we are not sure that we are arrived at the end
of this progression, and at the perfection of spiritual or theological
knowledge; and we fear that, if we should feel ourselves as if bound and
confined by it, and perhaps be unwilling to receive further improvement,
Neil Postman

Women prefer emotions to reasoning. ~ Stendhal

We've seen filibusters to block judicial nominations, jobs bills, political transparency, ending Big Oil subsidies - you name it, there's been a filibuster. ~ Elizabeth Warren

The government and its prosecutors are continually trying to block my efforts to win my freedom and expose their judicial wrong doings; they systematically try to block me from obtaining FBI files which I know would exonerate me. I don't know the exact conditions of everybody else, but I do know that I have been denied adequate and proper health care and I suffer greatly from that. ~ Leonard Peltier

Nothing of the sort. I knew you came from Afghanistan. From long habit the train of thoughts ran so swiftly through my mind, that I arrived at the conclusion without being conscious of intermediate steps. There were such steps, however. The train of reasoning ran, 'Here is a gentleman of a medical type, but with the air of a military man. Clearly an army doctor, then. He has just come from the tropics, for his face is dark, and that is not the natural tint of his skin, for his wrists are fair. He has undergone hardship and sickness, as his haggard face says clearly. His left arm has been injured. He holds it in a stiff and unnatural manner. Where in the tropics could an English army doctor have seen much hardship and got his arm wounded? Clearly in Afghanistan.' The whole train of thought did not occupy a second. I then remarked that you came from Afghanistan, and you were astonished. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

It seemed to me an error in reasoning for a man to isolate a woman he loves from all the circumstances in which he met her and in which she lives, to try, with dogged inner concentration, to purify her of everything that is not her self, which is to say also of the story that they lived through together and that gives their ove its shape.
After all, what I love in a woman is not what she is in and for herself, but the side of herself she turns toward me, what she is for me. I love her as a character in our common love story. ~ Milan Kundera

The basis of the discovery is imagination, careful reasoning and experimentation where the use of knowledge created by those who came before is an important component. ~ Bengt I. Samuelsson

If a man is not sure of his future, he should consciously adjust his thinking. ~ Duop Chak Wuol

There is a moment when the dead man, too, cancels further revision of the impure.
Thus, the dead man is a postscript to closure.
The dead man is also a form of circular reasoning, the resident tautologist in an oval universe that is robin's-egg-blue to future generations.
Perhaps it's so not important that the dead man lives.
After all, the dead man deserts the future. ~ Marvin Bell

Appeal to all scholars of stupidity in the world. Come to Italy, this country has the highest rate of morons of the universe, especially among political, bureaucratic, judicial, religious, intellectual, artistic, and mass media members, so it is the best place to develop your own field research. ~ William C. Brown

The conference guide yielded up a plethora of fascinating talks: Neural Substrates of Symbolic Reasoning, Intelligence and Prospects for Increasing It, Emotive-Loop Programming: A New Path to Artificial General Intelligence. How could they even hold these talks? In the US the topics of half of them would be classified as Emerging Technological Threats. No wonder the international meeting trumps the US neuroscience meetings these days, Kade thought. The cutting edge stuff isn't legal at home any more. ~ Ramez Naam

Reasoning away faith means helping people to abandon a faulty epistemology, but reasoning away religion means that people abandon their social support network. ~ Peter Boghossian

Sometimes in life, you may take a step, only to realize the steps you missed. Sometimes in life, you may delay a step taking, only to see a step you shouldn't have miss. Notwithstanding the results of your steps, you still ought to take steps. Life keeps moving and you can't afford to be static! Keep on moving on! ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Von Neumann languages do not have useful properties for reasoning about programs. Axiomatic and denotational semantics are precise tools for describing and understanding conventional programs, but they only talk about them and cannot alter their ungainly properties. Unlike von Neumann languages, the language of ordinary algebra is suitable both for stating its laws and for transforming an equation into its solution, all within the language. ~ John Backus

Feelings could override facts, as facts could alter feelings. Choose the truth first, rather than following after feelings. ~ Anthony Liccione

Most people, if you describe a train of events to them will tell you what the result would be. They can put those events together in their minds, and argue from them that something will come to pass. There are few people, however, who, if you told them a result, would be able to evolve from their own inner consciousness what the steps were which led up to that result. This power is what I mean when I talk of reasoning backward, or analytically. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

I got fame and fortune, and I lost my sense of reasoning. ~ Little Richard

The source of work? Man's mind ... man's reasoning mind. ~ Ayn Rand

So the danger of conservative judicial activism has been averted for another year. Stay tuned. ~ Michael Kinsley

Then what about the actual acquiring of knowledge? Is the body an
obstacle when one associates with it in the search for knowledge? I mean,
for example, do men find any truth in sight or hearing, or are not even
the poets forever telling us that we do not see or hear anything accurately,
and surely if those two physical senses are not clear or precise, our other
senses can hardly be accurate, as they are all inferior to these. Do you not
think so?
I certainly do, he said.
When then, he asked, does the soul grasp the truth? For whenever it
attempts to examine anything with the body, it is clearly deceived by it.
True.
Is it not in reasoning if anywhere that any reality becomes clear to
the soul? ~ Plato

I find no flaw in your reasoning about the Analytical Engine; I admire it; but you are aware that it rests entirely on the hypothesis that I care for the 'whole human race. ~ Charles Babbage

Their reliance on biblical quotations does not augur well for their for their openness to moral reasoning ... ~ Peter Singer

Human thoughts about things of which neither pure reasoning nor experience provides any knowledge may differ so radically that no agreement can be reached. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

And did not the degeneration of religion begin with reason itself? As Santayana says, the process of degeneration of religion was due to too much reasoning: "This religion unhappily long ago ceased to be wisdom expressed in fancy in order to become superstition overlaid with reasoning." The decay of religion is due to the pedantic spirit, in the invention of creeds, formulas, articles of faith, doctrines and apologies. We become increasingly less pious as we increasingly justify and rationalize our beliefs and become so sure that we are right. ~ Lin Yutang

Let him cry whoever feels like crying, for we were animals before we became reasoning beings, and the shedding of a tear, whether of forgiveness or of pity or of sheer delight at beauty, will do him a lot of good. ~ Lin Yutang

Appointing a sitting federal appellate judge also gives a president a unique twofer opportunity, creating a lower-court vacancy that the president can fill with a second (presumably supportive) appointee. If a sitting federal appellate judge placed on the Supreme Court is in turn replaced by a sitting federal trial judge, a president can turn a single Supreme Court vacancy into three judicial appointments. ~ Anonymous

...the perfect enigmas, the ones that, at first glance, were inexplicable. I liked to see how - in a disorganized but predictable world - an organized but totally unpredictable way of reasoning emerged. ~ Pablo De Santis

Too many people get away with truly awful 'reasoning', not because what they are arguing happens to be true, but because they are in the majority. ~ Ellie Rose McKee

Book critics or theatre critics can be derisively negative and gain delighted praise for the trenchant with of their review. But in criticisms of religion even clarity ceases to be a virtue and sounds like aggressive hostility. A politician may attack an opponent scathingly across the floor of the House and earn plaudits for his robust pugnacity. But let a soberly reasoning critic of religion employ what would in other contexts sound merely direct or forthright, and it will be described as a 'rant'. ~ Richard Dawkins

For God to be kept out of the classroom or out of America's public debate by nervous school administrators or overcautious politicians serves no one's interests. That restriction prevents people from drawing on this country's rich and diverse religious heritage for guidance, and it degrades the nation's moral discourse by placing a whole realm of theological reasoning out of bounds. The price of that sort of quarantine, at a time of moral dislocation, is - and has been - far too high. ~ Nancy Gibbs

It's not that fun to just play a villain, without any reasoning behind it. ~ Nicholas Lea

I learned early that you'd better know what you're talking about. You'd better realize that certain issues are going to be so hot - no matter what reason, what logic you apply to it - you're going to be met with an opposition just because their viewpoint is different, and there's no way they're going to accept your reasoning. Furthermore, they're going to attack you because you will be portrayed as not being credible: "You're an actor. What do you know?" ~ Robert Redford

[I]t seems to me that a lot of the stranger ideas people have about medicine derive from an emotional struggle with the very notion of a pharmaceutical industry. Whatever our political leanings, we all feel nervous about profit taking any role in the caring professions, but that feeling has nowhere to go. Big pharma is evil; I would agree with that premise. But because people don't understand exactly how big pharma is evil, their anger gets diverted away from valid criticisms - its role in distorting data, for example, or withholding lifesaving AIDS drugs from the developing world - and channeled into infantile fantasies. "Big pharma is evil," goes the line of reasoning; "therefore homeopathy works and the MMR vaccine causes autism." This is probably not helpful. ~ Ben Goldacre

I am apt, however, to entertain a Suspicion, that the World is still too young to fix any general stable Truths in Politics, which will remain true to the latest Posterity. We have not as yet had Experience of above three thousand Years; so that not only the Art of Reasoning is still defective in this Science, as well as in all others, but we even want sufficient Materials, upon which we can reason. 'Tis not sufficiently known, what Degrees of Refinement, either in Virtue or Vice, human Nature is susceptible of; nor what may be expected of Mankind from any great Revolution in their Education, Customs, or Principles. ~ David Hume

Crazy people are not crazy if one accepts their reasoning. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

A serious girl, when she finds someone who calms her spirit and quiets her busy thoughts, will love you so fiercely, it will defy even her own logic and reasoning. ~ Michelle Dammit

There is a strange sort of reasoning in Hollywood that musicals are less worthy of Academy consideration than dramas. It's a form of snobbism, the same sort that perpetuates the idea that drama is more deserving of Awards than comedy. ~ Gene Kelly

Conservative critics of Obama seized on his aspiration for 'empathy,' declaring it an invitation to judicial activism - as if empathy could not coexist with impartiality - and later made it a subtext of their confirmation complaints. ~ Joan Biskupic

It is always the individual who thinks. Society does not think any more than it eats or drinks. The evolution of human reasoning from the naive thinking of primitive man to the more subtle thinking of modern science took place within society. However, thinking itself is always an achievement of individuals. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

What could me more plausible than a line of reasoning which argues that the explanation of the origin of a system was to achieve an end that has in fact been achieved? ~ Immanuel Wallerstein

If logic itself is created rather than being inborn, it follows that the first task of education is to form reasoning. ~ Jean Piaget

Chess can help a child develop logical thinking, decision making, reasoning, and pattern recognition skills, which in turn can help math and verbal skills. ~ Susan Polgar

Just as summer-killed meat draws flies, so the court draws spurious sages, philosophists, and acosmists who remain there as long as their purses and their wits will maintain them, in the hope (at first) of an appointment from the Autarch and (later) of obtaining a tutorial position in some exalted family. At sixteen or so, Thecla was attracted, as I think young women often are, to their lectures on theogony, thodicy, and the like, and I recall one particularly in which a phoebad put forward as an ultimate truth the ancient sophistry of the existence of three Adonai, that of the city (or of the people), that of the poets, and that of the philosophers. Her reasoning was that since the beginning of human consciousness (if such a beginning ever was) there have been vast numbers of persons in the three categories who have endeavored to pierce the secret of the divine. If it does not exist, they should have discovered that long before; if it does, it is not possible that Truth itself should mislead them. Yet the beliefs of the populace, the insights of the rhapsodists, and the theories of the metaphysicians have so far diverged that few of them can so much as comprehend what the others say, and someone who knew nothing of any of their ideas might well believe there was no connection at all between them.

May it not be, she asked (and even now I am not certain I can answer), that instead of traveling, as has always been supposed, down three roads to the same destination, t ~ Gene Wolfe

Man is a reasoning Animal. ~ Seneca The Younger

Even a trashy movie can make you cry. There were deep emotional reactions that ducked the censure of the higher reasoning processes and forced us to enact, however vestigially, our roles - me, the indignant secret lover revealed; Clarissa the woman cruelly betrayed. ~ Ian McEwan

To the extent that the judicial profession becomes the daily routine of deciding cases on the most secure precedents and the narrowest grounds available, the judicial mind atrophies and its perspective shrinks. ~ Irving R. Kaufman