Quotes about courthouse

A collection of quotes on the topic of courthouse, down, people, day.

Quotes about courthouse

Fannie Lou Hamer photo

“A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.”

Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) French philosopher

Source: A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

William H. Rehnquist photo

“Somewhere "out there," beyond the walls of the courthouse, run currents and tides of public opinion which lap at the courtroom door.”

William H. Rehnquist (1924–2005) Chief Justice of the United States

Address at Suffolk University Law School; quoted in The New York Times (17 April 1986).
Books, articles, and speeches

Mark Satin photo

“Scott wants us each to talk about "the kind of society we'd like to live in." … From the start I am very nervous. Phil goes on about "the redistribution of wealth"; nearly everyone comes out for "socialism" of one kind or another; Brick even hints at "another revolution." When it is my time to speak I am moved to say, "I think people's tolerance is the main issue, even more than socialism. I mean, look at the people who are for the war. Look at the courthouse square."”

Mark Satin (1946) American political theorist, author, and newsletter publisher

I am afraid to go on and say what I don't like about socialism. ...
Pages 93–94. It's the spring of 1965. Satin had dropped out of college to become a volunteer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Holly Springs, Mississippi. The meeting above had been called by SNCC to explore SNCC workers' views.
Confessions of a Young Exile (1976)

“The window I'm proudest of is at the Granby courthouse. … When the building was inaugurated …the Bishop of Saint-Hyacinthe… told me something that still warms my heart.
"Why is the third story so beautiful? Isn't that where people wait to be taken to prison?"
"Everyone has the right to see a flower before dying, Your Grace. The flowers shouldn't be grey."”

Marcelle Ferron (1924–2001) Canadian artist

"You speak like the Gospels."
Original in French: La verrière dont je suis la plus fière se trouve au palais de justice de Granby. … À l'inauguration de l'édifice... l'évêque de Saint-Hyacinthe... m'a fait un commentaire qui me rechauffe toujours le coeur.
Pourquoi le troisième étage est-il si beau? N'est-ce pas là ou se trouvent les gens qui attendent leur transfert en prison?
Monseigneur, tout homme a le droit de voir une fleur avant de mourir. Il ne faut pas que les fleurs soient grises.
Vous parlez comme les Évangiles.
L'esquisse d'une mémoire, 1996

Robert E. Lee photo

“Governor, if I had foreseen the use those people designed to make of their victory, there would have been no surrender at Appomattox Courthouse; no sir, not by me. Had I foreseen these results of subjugation, I would have preferred to die at Appomattox with my brave men, my sword in my right hand.”

Robert E. Lee (1807–1870) Confederate general in the Civil War

Supposedly made to Governor Fletcher S. Stockdale (September 1870), as quoted in The Life and Letters of Robert Lewis Dabney, pp. 497-500; however, most major researchers including Douglas Southall Freeman, Shelby Dade Foote, Jr., and Bruce Catton consider the quote a myth and refuse to recognize it. “T. C. Johnson: Life and Letters of Robert Lewis Dabney, 498 ff. Doctor Dabney was not present and received his account of the meeting from Governor Stockdale. The latter told Dabney that he was the last to leave the room, and that as he was saying good-bye, Lee closed the door, thanked him for what he had said and added: "Governor, if I had foreseen the use these people desired to make of their victory, there would have been no surrender at Appomattox, no, sir, not by me. Had I foreseen these results of subjugation, I would have preferred to die at Appomattox with my brave men, my sword in this right hand." This, of course, is second-hand testimony. There is nothing in Lee's own writings and nothing in direct quotation by first-hand witness that accords with such an expression on his part. The nearest approach to it is the claim by H. Gerald Smythe that "Major Talcott" — presumably Colonel T. M. R. Talcott — told him Lee stated he would never have surrendered the army if he had known how the South would have been treated. Mr. Smythe stated that Colonel Talcott replied, "Well, General, you have only to blow the bugle," whereupon Lee is alleged to have answered, "It is too late now" (29 Confederate Veteran, 7). Here again the evidence is not direct. The writer of this biography, talking often with Colonel Talcott, never heard him narrate this incident or suggest in any way that Lee accepted the results of the radical policy otherwise than with indignation, yet in the belief that the extremists would not always remain in office”.
Misattributed

Jay Leiderman photo
Bruce Springsteen photo
John Updike photo

“[Harry listening to car radio] …he resents being made to realise, this late, that the songs of his life were as moronic as the rock the brainless kids now feed on, or the Sixties and Seventies stuff that Nelson gobbled up – all of it designed for empty heads and overheated hormones, an ocean white with foam, and listening to it now is like trying to eat a double banana split the way he used to. It's all disposable, cooked up to turn a quick profit. They lead us down the garden path, the music manufacturers, then turn around and lead the next generation down with a slightly different flavour of glop.
Rabbit feels betrayed. He was reared in a world where war was not strange but change was: the world stood still so you could grow up in it. He knows when the bottom fell out. When they closed down Kroll's, Kroll's that had stood in the centre of Brewer all those years, bigger than a church, older than a courthouse, right at the head of Weiser Square there,… […] So when the system just upped one summer and decided to close Kroll's down, just because shoppers had stopped coming in because the downtown had become frightening to white people, Rabbit realised the world was not solid and benign, it was a shabby set of temporary arrangements rigged up for the time being, all for the sake of money. You just passed through, and they milked you for what you were worth, mostly when you were young and gullible. If Kroll's could go, the courthouse could go, the banks could go. When the money stopped, they could close down God himself.”

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

John F. Kennedy photo
Yuval Noah Harari photo
Marc Maron photo
Barbara Kingsolver photo
John Danforth photo
George Carlin photo
Learned Hand photo

“"I beseech ye in the bowels of Christ, think that ye may be mistaken." I should like to have that written over the portals of every church, every school, and every courthouse, and, may I say, of every legislative body in the United States. I should like to have every court begin, "I beseech ye in the bowels of Christ, think that we may be mistaken."”

Learned Hand (1872–1961) American legal scholar, Court of Appeals judge

Morals in Public Life (1951); Hand is here paraphrasing a famous expression of Oliver Cromwell from his letter of 3 August 1650 to the general assembly of the Church of Scotland.
Extra-judicial writings

Halldór Laxness photo
Merle Haggard photo

“I'm proud to be an Okie from Muskogee,
A place where even squares can have a ball.
We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse,
And white lightnin's still the biggest thrill of all.”

Merle Haggard (1937–2016) American country music song writer, singer and musician

"Okie from Muskogee" (September 1969), co-written with Roy Edward Burris, for Okie from Muskogee (October 1969)

Richard Henry Dana Jr. photo
Bruce Springsteen photo
Toni Morrison photo

“There is and will be rousing language to keep citizens armed and arming; slaughtered and slaughtering in the malls, courthouses, post offices, playgrounds, bedrooms and boulevards; stirring, memorializing language to mask the pity and waste of needless death. There will be more diplomatic language to countenance rape, torture, assassination.”

Toni Morrison (1931–2019) American writer

Nobel Prize Lecture (1993)
Context: There is and will be rousing language to keep citizens armed and arming; slaughtered and slaughtering in the malls, courthouses, post offices, playgrounds, bedrooms and boulevards; stirring, memorializing language to mask the pity and waste of needless death. There will be more diplomatic language to countenance rape, torture, assassination. There is and will be more seductive, mutant language designed to throttle women, to pack their throats like paté-producing geese with their own unsayable, transgressive words; there will be more of the language of surveillance disguised as research; of politics and history calculated to render the suffering of millions mute; language glamorized to thrill the dissatisfied and bereft into assaulting their neighbors; arrogant pseudo-empirical language crafted to lock creative people into cages of inferiority and hopelessness.