John Roberts Quotations

Justice Rehnquist was friendly and unpretentious. He wore scuffed Hush Puppy shoes. That was my first lesson. Clothes do not make the man. The Justice sported long sideburns and Buddy Holly glasses long after they were fashionable. And he wore loud ties that I am confident were never fashionable.

Judges are like umpires. Umpires don't make the rules. They apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules. But it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ballgame to see the umpire.

Judges have to have the humility to recognize that they operate within a system of precedent, shaped by other judges equally striving to live up to the judicial oath.

I will be vigilant to protect the independence and integrity of the Supreme Court, and I will work to ensure that it upholds the rule of law and safeguards those liberties that make this land one of endless possibilities for all Americans.

A chief justice's authority is really quite limited, and the dynamic among all the justices is going to affect whether he can accomplish much or not. There is this convention of referring to the Taney Court, the Marshall Court, the Fuller Court, but a chief justice has the same vote that everyone else has.

The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.

President Ronald Reagan used to speak of the Soviet constitution, and he noted that it purported to grant wonderful rights of all sorts to people. But those rights were empty promises, because that system did not have an independent judiciary to uphold the rule of law and enforce those rights.

While some of the tales of woe emanating from the court are enough to bring tears to the eyes, it is true that only Supreme Court justices and schoolchildren are expected to and do take the entire summer off.

I think judicial temperament is a willingness to step back from your own committed views of the correct jurisprudential approach and evaluate those views in terms of your role as a judge. It's the difference between being a judge and being a law professor.

It's sobering to think of the seventeen chief justices; certainly a solid majority of them have to be characterized as failures. The successful ones are hard to number.

By ensuring that no one in government has too much power, the Constitution helps protect ordinary Americans every day against abuse of power by those in authority.

There is no better gift a society can give children than the opportunity to grow up safe and free - the chance to pursue whatever dreams they may have.

When we go to a restaurant, they don't ask, 'Do you want the asbestos section or the non-asbestos section?' They do ask, 'Do you want smoking or nonsmoking?'

You can't fight for your rights if you don't know what they are.

Anytime you get nine people together, whether it's at a party or it's in the conference room of the Supreme Court, you do have to maintain some order, or it does kind of degenerate into squabbling pretty quickly.

People, for reasons of their own, often fail to do things that would be good for them or good for society.

If children do not understand the Constitution, they cannot understand how our government functions, or what their rights and responsibilities are as citizens of the United States.

When I worked in the Department of Justice, in the office of the solicitor general, it was my job to argue cases for the United States before the Supreme court. I always found it very moving to stand before the justices and say, 'I speak for my country.'

Legislative novelty is not necessarily fatal; there is a first time for everything.

I go to the opera. It's mostly my wife that's a bigger fan, I'd say, than I am. I like the big opera. I want a lot of people on stage, elephants and marching stuff, and the modern stuff I don't care for.

The Affordable Care Act's requirement that certain individuals pay a financial penalty for not obtaining health insurance may reasonably be characterized as a tax.

There's a lot of the Midwest and the West in Justice Rehnquist's approach to constitutional law. And by that I mean a recognition that people know pretty well how to govern themselves, that government that is closest to the people is apt to be more responsive to their legitimate concerns and needs.

I don't type on the computer or edit. Law students who went to law school really just a couple years after I did were brought up all on the computers and that's how they do it, but I was still part of the older school.

A justice is not like a law professor, who might say, 'This is my theory... and this is what I'm going to be faithful to and consistent with,' and in twenty years will look back and say, 'I had a consistent theory of the First Amendment as applied to a particular area.'

It is a great thing about having young children, is that they don't really care whether you're the chief justice or whatever, and they do make sure that you have a good perspective on life and what's important.

unprecedented attempt by Congress to structure the office of the president.

Global warming may be a 'crisis,' even 'the most pressing environmental problem of our time.' ... Indeed, it may ultimately affect nearly everyone on the planet in some potentially adverse way, and it may be that governments have done too little to address it. It is not a problem, however, that has escaped the attention of policymakers in the Executive and Legislative Branches of our Government, who continue to consider regulatory, legislative, and treaty-based means of addressing global climate change.

Senator, my answer is that the independence and integrity of the Supreme Court requires that nominees before this committee for a position on that court not forecast, give predictions, give hints, about how they might rule in cases that might come before the Supreme Court,.

An important function of the Supreme Court is to provide guidance, .. As a lower court judge, I appreciate clear guidance from the Supreme Court.

You don't doubt that the lobby supporting the enactment of same sex-marriage laws in different states is politically powerful, do you?... As far as I can tell, political figures are falling over themselves to endorse your side of the case.

We cannot deny that our decision today will have an impact on the ability of law enforcement to combat crime. Cell phones have become important tools in facilitating coordination and communication among members of criminal enterprises, and can provide valuable incriminating information about dangerous criminals. Privacy comes at a cost.

Sometimes it’s just surreal out there, while you’re running a marathon. People just standing out in the cold, even the rain, cheering for you, blasting music for you. It’s an awesome show of camaraderie and community.

I'm not sure that it's right to view this as excluding a particular group. When the institution of marriage developed historically, people didn't get around and say, 'Let's have this institution, but let's keep out homosexuals.' The institution developed to serve purposes that, by their nature, didn't include homosexual couples.

When we think about living donor transplant, what we're banking on is the ability of the liver to regenerate itself. Now, it's not the same sort of regeneration we think about with the starfish where we cut off the arm and it grows a new arm. With the liver, what happens is the remaining liver gets bigger, and your body knows the size of the liver that it needs, and when it recognizes that there is not enough liver, it sends nutrients and signals to the liver and says "get bigger."

End-stage liver disease refers to a liver that's failing, and a very high percentage of those livers are what we call cirrhotic, or the patient's liver has become cirrhotic, and what cirrhosis is, is the scarring of the liver tissue.

There are many different causes of the scarring. Viruses are common. Hepatitis B, hepatitis C, what we call autoimmune diseases where the body attacks the liver itself such as primary biliary cirrhosis is an autoimmune disease; sclerosing cholangitis is an autoimmune disease; and so those diseases where the liver is being destroyed by either the virus or an autoimmune disease, it can only scar, and why it doesn't regenerate has to do with the fact that there is this ongoing scar tissue that blocks that regeneration.

When a liver becomes cirrhotic, those are the common complications. We see that the patients have bleeding from their stomach and intestines. They have abdomens that become full of fluid. Their ankles swell with the same type of fluid, and they also can become confused and not themselves. Those are kind of the main things that we see when people get end-stage liver disease and have cirrhosis.

There is a risk of death associated with donating a piece of liver. It's about one in 500 for the risk of death. The risk of death of donating a kidney is about one in 3000, so this is a riskier operation than donating a kidney. The stakes are usually higher for the recipient of the transplant because unlike kidney failure, where you have a dialysis machine, in liver failure we don't have that kind of machine that allows a patient to survive until they can get a cadaver organ.

We are always in awe of what the donors have done in terms of providing of themselves to the recipients. It really is a heroic act because people take on themselves not only a risk of death but also pain-and-suffering in order for their loved one to get the benefit of the liver transplant.

If it's a situation in which the public is being given access, you can't discriminate against the media and say, as a general matter, that the media don't have access, because their access rights, of course, correspond with those of the public.

If we had enough cadaver organs to go around we wouldn't do living donor liver transplants because one is we don't want to put a donor at risk, but the second is that it's a more difficult surgery for the recipient because you're getting a piece of a liver rather than a whole liver. It takes you longer to recover, and it has more complications related to where we sew together the blood vessels and the bile ducts.

Trivial facts are often the best hints to what is going on.

If the Constitution says that the little guy should win, the little guy is going to win in court before me, ... But if the Constitution says that the big guy should win, well, then the big guy is going to win because my obligation is to the Constitution.

The Romans had been able to post their laws on boards in public places, confidant that enough literate people existed to read them; far into the Middle Ages, even kings remained illiterate.

Pretty much everybody knows there are not enough organs for all of those patients who need to get transplants, and what happens is, is that organs are actually directed in liver transplantation to those patients who are the sickest. So the patients who have the greatest chance of dying in the next three months or so are the ones who get the priority for the liver transplant.

The States are separate and independent sovereigns. Sometimes they need to act like it.

I find that when I tell lawyer jokes to a mixed audience, the lawyers don't think they're funny and the non-lawyers don't think they're jokes.

You don't look to your own values and beliefs. You look outside yourself to other sources.

When we found out they were going to move, we kind of made a little resolution that we're going to try to come out here as much as we can.

We can contend that we have already done what the statute envisions, ... The president has demanded an accounting from the Soviets, and has done so repeatedly.

would be easy to meet in most cases.

We have to find out what is going on and have a firm commitment from the Commonwealth to save the barracks precinct.

Well, Senator, I can't answer that question in the abstract,

Well, senator, as a legal matter, it is abstract,

Yes, I was in an administration that was opposed to quotas, ... Opposition to quotas is not the same thing as opposition to affirmative action.

We didn't want to end like last year. I wanted to get through for them.

We have had a bearish week in U.S. markets and people who had thought the range in rates would hold are now re-evaluating that view as the evidence points to a stronger U.S. economy.

There are many areas where it appears I knew a lot more when I was 25 than I know now, when I'm 50, ... I certainly wouldn't write everything today as I wrote it back then, but I don't think any of us would do things or write things today as we did when we were 25 and had all the answers.

Many of the proposals for dealing with the zero bound rely on influencing expectations, both of future interest rates and of future inflation.

Senator, that's a question that I don't think can be answered in the abstract. You need to know the particular circumstances and exactly what the facts are and what the legislation would be like, because the argument on the other side -- and as a judge, I would obviously be in a position of considering both arguments: the argument for the legislature and the argument for the executive. The argument on the executive side will rely on authority as commander in chief and whatever authorities derive from that.

Senator, I believe that no one is above the law under our system, and that includes the president. The president is fully bound by the law, the constitution and statutes.

Senator, I believe that no one is above the law in our system, and that includes our president,

... She took the position that she should not comment. Justice O'Connor took the same position. She was asked about a particular case.

She will say what people want to hear in order to win. That's her history. She is just a craven, cynical, hypocritical politician.

She said, It's not correct for me to comment. Now, there's a reason for that.

She gave us respect and we trusted her. If you start positive then you can go on and be negative. That is how you get respect. We did not really see her as a coach or African-American. We just saw her as a coach that we trusted.

Mr. Jones suggests in his letter that you would have reacted differently to an alleged civil rights violation, and in a thinly veiled threat, asserts that the alleged insensitivity of the administration to fundamentalist Christians will not go unnoticed by that sizable voting block,

One reason people admire justice Jackson so much is that although he had strong views as attorney general, he recognized when he became a member of the Supreme Court that his job had changed, and he was not the president's lawyer,

One of our greatest success stories of the last couple of years is our commitment to provide up-scale affordable senior housing. You will see the fourth complex begin construction in 2006.

Of course gender discrimination is a serious problem. It's a particular concern of mine and always has been. I grew up with three sisters, all of whom work outside the home. I married a lawyer who works outside the home. I have a young daughter who I hope will have all of the opportunities available to her without regard to any gender discrimination. There's no suggestion in anything that I've written of any resistance to the basic idea of full citizenship without regard to gender.

My faith and my religious beliefs do not play a role.

No, I don't think there is, ... You look outside yourself, to other sources. This is the basis for judges (to) wear black robes, because it doesn't matter who they are as individuals . . . it's their understanding of the law that will shape the decision.

No, I don't think there is. Sometimes it's hard to give meaning to a constitutional term in a particular case. But you don't look to your own values and beliefs. You look outside yourself to other sources. This is the basis for ? you know, judges wear black robes because it doesn't matter who they are as individuals. That's not going to shape their decision. It's their understanding of the law that will shape their decision.

On the other hand, simple disagreement about whether it's an appropriate issue for the public to see would not strike me as a very compelling governmental interest,

I would resist the suggestion that I'm racially insensitive, ... I know why the phrase, 'Equal Justice Under Law' is carved in marble above the Supreme Court entrance.

If we're relying on a German judge about what our Constitution means, no president accountable to the people appointed that judge and no Senate accountable to the people confirmed that judge. And yet, he's playing a role in shaping the law that binds the people in this country.

If we're relying on a decision from a German judge about what our Constitution means, no president accountable to the people appointed that judge and no Senate accountable to the people confirmed that judge. And yet he's playing a role in shaping the law that binds the people in this country. I think that's a concern that has to be addressed.

If they want to sell and get out, if they have enough land, it's OK, they can downsize and do that.

I'd accuse (judges or justices who rely on foreign law) of getting it wrong on that point and I'd hope to sit down with them and debate it and reason about it,

I come before the committee with no agenda. I have no platform. Judges are not politicians who can promise to do certain things in exchange for votes,

I am honoured and humbled by the confidence the president has shown in me.

I am honored and humbled by the confidence the president has shown in me, ... I am very much aware that if I am confirmed I would succeed a man I deeply respect and admire, a man who has been very kind to me for 25 years.

I am honored and humbled by the confidence that the president has shown in me,

I am honored and humbled by the confidence that the president had shown in me,

I am tremendously energized and excited by the opportunity to join an organization that time and time again has demonstrated an extraordinary commitment to rock-solid journalism, a dedication that has rightly earned CNN recognition as the global leader in news coverage.

But there are thousands, tens of thousands of other people in this area who just have no place to go,

I look to the law books, ... I don't look to the Bible.

I have been fortunate for the past two years to serve on a court in which all of the judges ... put aside those (political) ties and those views and become judges all focused on the same mission of vindicating the rule of law. And if you look at the decisions of the D.C. Circuit, you'll see that we're almost always unanimous. We almost always come out the same way and to the extent there are disagreements, they don't shape up along political lines,

I have an understanding of people of the first ward. I want to be a voice for those people.

I feel the need to stay away from a discussion of particular cases.

I don't think you can read those opinions and say that these are the opinions of an ideologue,

If the Constitution says that the little guy should win, then the little guy's going to win in the court before me, ... But if the Constitution says that the big guy should win, well then the big guy's going to win because my obligation is to the Constitution.

If the Constitution says that the little guy should win, the little guy's going to win in court before me, ... But if the Constitution says that the big guy should win, well, then the big guy's going to win.

He did what a judge should do, not give any indication on any specific case or how he might look at that because if he does, he's not going to be the impartial arbiter a judge should be,

What makes you think liberals are against that philosophy?

We must evaluate not only his qualifications, but also his ability to keep an open mind, his sensitivity to the concerns of all Americans and their right to equal protection under the laws; not only his intellectual capacity, but his judgment and wisdom; not only his achievements, but his fairness and his courage to stand up to the other branches of government when they infringe on the rights and liberties of our citizens.

He was a fine guy, one who brought practical experience to the classroom.

has adopted this siege mentality in which the best way to deflect the question is to attack the questioner. I'm not quite sure who he's playing to -- maybe the segment of the Republican Party that believes we're a bunch of liberals who have our own agenda.

There are situations that arise when an executive may determine that that type of action is necessary. That may be challenged,

I think it is a jolt to the legal system when you overturn precedent. ... It is not enough that you may think that a prior decision was wrongly decided,