Archibald Cox famous quotes

A free society depends upon a high degree of mutual trust. The public will not give that trust to officials who are not seen to be impartially dedicated to the general public interest, nor will they give trust to those high in government who violate the rule of law they ask citizens to obey at the expense of self-interest, or to those who present government as the place where one feathers his own nest, [or] exchanges favors with friends and former associates.
-- Archibald Cox

#Government #Self #Law

A great many college graduates come here thinking of lawyers as social engineers arguing the great Constitutional issues.
-- Archibald Cox

#College #Thinking #Issues

What can you or I do? Alone, almost nothing. Yet one person - you alone - can make the difference. . . . The failure of just one person to join, to participate, to do whatever he or she can - your failure or my failure - may mean that there is just one too few to win the fight for sanity, and so leave the world on the road to destruction. Each of us, all of us, must do what we can.
-- Archibald Cox

#Mean #Fighting #Winning

Through the centuries, men of law have been persistently concerned with the resolution of disputes in ways that enable society to achieve its goals with a minimum of force and maximum of reason.
-- Archibald Cox

#Men #Law #Goal

Watergate showed more strengths in our system than weaknesses... The whole country did take part in quite a genuine sense in passing judgment on Richard Nixon.
-- Archibald Cox

#Country #Weakness #Judgment

I confess that I cannot understand how we can plot, lie, cheat and commit murder abroad and remain humane, honorable, trustworthy and trusted at home.
-- Archibald Cox

#Lying #Home #Plot

Whether ours shall be a government of laws and not of men is now for Congress and ultimately the American people.
-- Archibald Cox

#Men #Law #People

... true civil disobedience ... compels the state to resort to power.
-- Archibald Cox

#States #Resorts #Civil Disobedience

[The U.S. government] was tired of treaties. They were tired of sacred hills. They were tired of ghost dances. And they were tired of all the inconveniences of the Sioux. So they brought out their cannons. 'You want to be an Indian now?' they said, finger on the trigger.

The whole history of Israel, its ritual and its government, is explicable only as it is typical of the spiritual Israel, of the sacrifice on Calvary, of the precious blood which alone can wash away sin.

The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly.

The people will save their government, if the government itself will allow them.

Just try to learn the truth by approaching a spiritual master. Inquire from him submissively and render service unto him. The self-realized soul can impart knowledge unto you because he has seen the truth.

I'm addicted to self-improvement. The thing is, there's so damn much about myself to improve.

Happiness is attained, not through self-interest, but through unconditional fidelity in endless love of eternal light.

American ladies are known abroad for two distinguishing traits (besides, possibly, their beauty and self-reliance), and these are their ill-health and their extravagant devotion to dress.

The Common Law of England has been laboriously built about a mythical figure-the figure of 'The Reasonable Man'.

Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take.