Category: Thought

All these guys they call judges? The federal judges? The Supreme Court judges? They’re not really judges. They’re just state agents whose job is to interpret the words written down on paper by other state agents. That’s it. Their job is not to do justice. Which is what a real judge does. A real judge tries to resolve dispute between two parties based upon principles of justices and fairness. These federal judges can’t do that, because their job is to interpret constitution and federal law, which is just positive enactments written down on paper by a bunch of elected bureaucrats, and members of the state. So, I don’t think they’re actual judges. They’re not actually doing law. What they’re interpreting is not law.

Stephan Kinsella, KOL361 | Libertarian Answer Man: Oaths: With Kent Wellington (October 13, 2021).

However elusive the concept may be, there is a universal human feeling, not confined to philosophers, lawyers, or judges, that there is a quality known as justice, and that it is the aim of legal institutions to achieve it. The Constitution invokes that sense and sentiment in its first purposive phrase: it is ordained “to establish justice.” Madison, writing in Federalist No. 51, called it “the end of civil society.” It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.” This feeling that justice is a supreme goal, this sense that it is a predicate to organized society, is no mere yearning, for it is only in a fair proceeding, one that comports with our sense of justice, that we can with any legitimacy call another human being to account.

Justice must not only be done; it must be seen to be done. The interest of justice requires more than a proceeding that reaches an objectively accurate result; trial by ordeal might by sheer chance accomplish that. It requires a proceeding that, by its obvious fairness, helps to justify itself.

Senior Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit Alvin Benjamin Rubin, U.S. v. McDaniels, 379 F.Supp. 1243 (E.D. La. 1974).

I would rather be beaten and be a man than to be elected and be a little puppy dog. I have always supported measures and principles and not men. I have acted fearless and independent and I never will regret my course. I would rather be politically buried than to be hypocritically immortalized.

David Crockett, after being defeated in the 1830 congressional elections for opposing the Indian Removal Act.

Like the Bolshevik system, the power politics of America now operates on a program of total obedience and conformity.

Stephen Cox, “Biden and the Bolsheviks,” Liberty (July 28, 2024).

We have the right as individuals to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right to appropriate a dollar of the public money.

Davy Crockett, Speech in the US House of Representatives on April 2, 1828, as quoted in The Life of Colonel David Crockett (1884) by Edward Sylvester Ellis.

That Liberalism may be a tendency towards something very different from itself, is a possibility in its nature. For it is something which tends to release energy rather than accumulate it, to relax, rather than to fortify. It is a movement not so much defined by its end, as by its starting point; away from, rather than towards, something definite. Our point of departure is more real to us than our destination; and the destination is likely to present a very different picture when arrived at, from the vaguer image formed in imagination. By destroying traditional social habits of the people, by dissolving their natural collective consciousness into individual constituents, by licensing the opinions of the most foolish, by substituting instruction for education, by encouraging cleverness rather than wisdom, the upstart rather than the qualified, by fostering a notion of getting on to which the alternative is a hopeless apathy, Liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own negation: the artificial, mechanised or brutalised control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos.

Thomas Stearns Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), Ch. I, pp. 15–16.

A cucumber is bitter. Throw it away. There are briars in the road. Turn aside from them. This is enough. Do not add, “And why were such things made in the world?”

Emperor and Pontifex Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Meditations, Book XIII, § 50

It is foolish to be outraged by a fact of nature.

Jack Vance, The Brave Free Men (1972; 1973).

There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.

Governor Timothy James Walz (D.-Minn.) to Marie Teresa Kumar, MSNBC host (December 29, 2022).

What is an evil man? The man is evil who coerces obedience to his private ends, destroys beauty, produces pain, extinguishes life.

Jack Vance, The Star King (1964).