Robert H. Jackson Quotes

Good government is the preservation of liberty, which in turn requires the absence of arbitrary, discretionary power in the chief magistrate.

In a republic, if laws are not always respectable, they are always respected.

Our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here, the people rule.

A good constitution is infinitely better than the best despot.

We cannot continue to claim that we are a nation of laws and not of men if our laws and, indeed, even the Constitution of the United States itself, may be summarily breached because of some determination of expediency or because the President says “trust me.”

For more than 500 years -- since the rise of nation-states and parliaments -- a preoccupation of Western political thought has been the problem of defining and confining executive power.

A government of laws, not of men.

Law should rule over rulers, and not rulers over the law

The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and peace.

… an empire of laws and not of men.

Are you willing to let any President choose what laws to enforce and what laws to change?

The United States is a constitutional republic, and the Founding Fathers fought to ensure that the mob couldn't undermine it.

A constitution, in the American sense of the word, is a written instrument by which the fundamental powers of the government are established, limited, and defined, and by which these powers are distributed among several departments, for their more safe and useful exercise, for the benefit of the body politic.

It is the genius of our Constitution that under its shelter of enduring institutions and rooted principles there is ample room for the rich fertility of American political invention.

Constitutional government, as designed by the framers, will survive only with a righteous people.

There is no liberty, if the power of judging be not separated from the legislative and executive powers.

When the President of the United States breaks the law he must be held accountable. That is why I am introducing today a resolution to censure George W. Bush…. At the very heart of our constitution is the assumption that some members of the government will do wrong, and when they do, others in the government must do right…. The President has broken the law. Congress must act…. Our job is not to stand up and cheer when the President breaks the law.

The Bush administration is not arguing that the President is above the law; they are arguing that the President is the law.

There is a difference between giving up privacy under the rule of law, and giving it up by executive fiat.

Where the laws are not supreme, there demagogues spring up .... The law ought to be supreme over all.

The federal constitution is perhaps the greatest of human experiments.

The President ... should be merely the executor of a power of decision that rests elsewhere; that is, in the Congress.

When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty.

Constitutional democracy is a Western idea.

it would be so dangerous for the Executive in a single Person to negative a Law that the People will not accept of it.