Dwight D. Eisenhower Quotes

What is going to rule our great commonwealth, the mob or the law?

Courts, not mobs, must execute the penalties of the law.

The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.

In our country the law of the strong does not prevail. The strength of the law prevails.

Can I suggest that the sheriff and the district attorney, in the lunch break, go out and read the Constitution.

The most difficult thing to build up is the rule of law. America already had it when their nation began.

When courts rule in our country, we have them as the final arbiter on matters in which we might not agree on. And that is an important pillar of our democracy.

Justice, not the majority, should rule.

Let's create a legal system that can work.

The court makes an amazing amount of decisions that ought to be made by the people.

And it is no less true, that personal security and private property rest entirely upon the wisdom, the stability, and the integrity of the courts of justice.

You have a good judicial system in the U.S., as you have learned from the Nixon-Watergate period.

Popularity makes no law invulnerable to invalidation. Americans accept judicial supervision of their democracy - judicial review of popular but possibly unconstitutional statutes - because they know that if the Constitution is truly to constitute the nation, it must trump some majority preferences.

Courts are an aristocratic institution in a democracy. That's the dilemma for an institution that has the function of reviewing the will of the people. We're bound to be "anti-majoritarian.

Preventing the arbitrary administration of punishment is a basic ideal of any society that purports to be governed by the rule of law.

Such a trial is not only unlawful but is a gross blunder in policy. It denies the great, fundamental principle, that ours is a government of Law, and that the law is strong enough to rule the people wisely and well.

Courts cannot refuse to hear a case on the merits merely because they would prefer not to.

The Supreme Court is the living voice of the Constitution—that is, of the will of the people expressed in the fundamental law they have enacted. It is ... the conscience of the people.... It is the guarantee of the minority who, when threatened by the impatient vehemence of the majority, can appeal to this permanent law, finding the interpreter and enforcer thereof in a Court set high above the assaults of faction.

A first principle of Anglo-American jurisprudence is that the ends do not justify the means.

Law enforcement does not ask an advantage in its struggle with the lawless. It asks only that the scales of justice be balanced. The cause of justice is not served when hardened criminals are allowed to go free through legal technicalities.

We cannot say that we love the rule of law and reject arguments that appeal to the rule of law as technicalities and hair splitting.

A democratic society cannot tolerate mob rule.

The judge has no right to divinations of public opinion which run counter to its last formal expressions.

The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials …

Rule of law is based on probable cause.