Of all my prosecutors ... not one is my peer, but each and all are my political sovereigns; and had your honor submitted my case t...o the jury, as was clearly your duty, then I should have had just cause of protest, for not one of those men was my peer; but, native or foreign born, white or black, rich or poor, educated or ignorant, sober or drunk, each and every man of them was my political superior; hence, in no sense, my peer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I'm no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and in the jury system--that is no ideal to me, it is a living, w...orking reality. Gentlemen, a court is no better than each man of you sitting before me on this jury. A court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men who make it up.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Do not look at wine when it is red, when it sparkles in the cup and goes down smoothly. At the last it bites like a serpent, and s...tings like an adder. Your eyes will see strange things, and your mind utter perverse things. You will be like one who lies down in the midst of the sea, like one who lies on the top of a mast. "They struck me," you will say, "but I was not hurt; they beat me, but I did not feel it. When shall I awake? I will seek another drink."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And when your children ask you, 'What do you mean by this observance?' you shall say, 'It is the passover sacrifice to the LORD, f...or he passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt, when he struck down the Egyptians but spared our houses.'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, b...ut not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The American mind exasperated the European as a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine-forest. The English mind disliked the French mind... because it was antagonistic, unreasonable, perhaps hostile, but recognized it as at least a thought. The American mind was not a thought at all; it was a convention, superficial, narrow, and ignorant; a mere cutting instrument, practical, economical, sharp and direct. The English themselves hardly conceived that their mind was either economical, sharp or direct; but the defect that most struck an American was its enormous waste in eccentricity. Americans needed and used their whole energy, and applied it with close economy; but English society was eccentric by law and for sake of the eccentricity itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My criticisms are always simple; they are limited to one word:MOmit! Every syllable that can be struck out is pure profit, and eve...ry page that can be economised is a five-per-cent dividend. Nature rebels against this rule; the flesh is weak, and shrinks from the scissors; I groan in retrospect over the weak words and useless pages I have written; but the law is sound, and every book written without a superfluous page or word is a masterpiece. All the same, no one cares to apply so stern a law to another person. One has right to be severe only with oneself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In general, one may pronounce kissing dangerous. A spark of fire has often been struck out of the collision of lips, that has blow...n up the whole magazine of virtue.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every European visitor to the United States is struck by the comparative rarity of what he would call a face, by the frequency of ...men and women who look like elderly babies. If he stays in the States for any length of time, he will learn that this cannot be put down to a lack of sensibility--the American feels the joys and sufferings of human life as keenly as anybody else. The only plausible explanation I can find lies in his different attitude to the past. To have a face, in the European sense of the word, it would seem that one must not only enjoy and suffer but also desire to preserve the memory of even the most humiliating and unpleasant experiences of the past.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If people like to read their books, it is all very well, but to be at so much trouble in filling great volumes, which, as I used t...o think, nobody would willingly ever look into, to be labouring only for the torment of little boys and girls, always struck me as a hard fate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »