The worthy administrators of justice are like a cat set to take care of a cheese, lest it should be gnawed by the mice. One bite of the cat does more damage to the cheese than twenty mice can do.

He who the sword of heaven will bear Should be as holy as severe.

The judge should not be young; he should have learned to know evil, not from his own soul, but from late and long observation of the nature of evil in others.

Judges commonly are elderly men, and are more likely to hate at sight any analysis to which they are not accustomed, and which disturbs repose of mind, than to fall in love with novelties.

The profession of the law of which he [a judge] is a part is charged with the articulation and final incidence of the successive efforts towards justice; it must feel the circulation of the communal blood or it will wither and drop off, a useless member.

Conservative political opinion in America cleaves to the tradition of the judge as passive interpreter, believing that his absolute loyalty to authoritative law is the price of his immunity from political pressure and of the security of his tenure.

To an incompetent judge I must not lie, but I may be silent; to a competent I must answer.

Take all the robes of all the good judges that have ever lived on the face of the earth, and they would not be large enough to cover the iniquity of one corrupt judge.

Judges must beware of hard constructions and strained inferences, for there is no worse torture than the torture of laws.

That judges of important causes should hold office for life is a disputable thing, for the mind grows old as well as the body.