The Judge Quotes

My job, I think, is the hardest job out of all the judges because I am the only one that is a performer.
- Paula Abdul

I really try at least to come back and answer the question as to whether that was really the best way to do that and was I really thinking straight and how did my opponents behave and how did the judges behave was needed.
- Floyd Abrams

It has something to do with the facts and the law and who the judges are. So I think lawyers sometimes exaggerate their role in winning and losing. Lawyers do have a role, and a major role, but they're not the only players in this game.
- Floyd Abrams

I also read modern novels - I have just had to read 60 as I am one of the judges for the Orange Fiction Prize.
- Kate Adie

The judge is found guilty when a criminal is acquitted.
- Publilius Syrus

Go fuck yourself Judge."
"Motion denied." answers the judge dryly.
- Jodi Picoult

It's just like nurses in a hospital tend to know more than the doctors most of the time; if you really want to get the answers to a question about court, you should spend more time buttering up the clerks than the judges.
- Jodi Picoult

Objection!" Metz shouts.
Grounds?" the judge asks.
Well...he's my witness!
- Jodi Picoult

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.
- Nelson Algren

A judge can't have any preferred outcome in any particular case. The judge's only obligation - and it's a solemn obligation - is to the rule of law.
- Samuel Alito

To use books rightly, is to go to them for help; to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail; to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own, and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions.
- John Ruskin

While awaiting sentencing, I decided to give stand-up comedy a shot. The judge had suggested I get my act together, and I took him seriously.
- Tim Allen

My mother was the force around which our world turned. Unlike our father, who spent his life in the clouds, my mother was propelled through the universe by the brute force of reason. She was the judge in all of our arguments. One disapproving word from her was enough to send us off to hide in a corner, where we would cry and fantasize our own martyrdom. And yet. One kiss could restore us to princedom. Without her, our lives would dissolve into chaos.
- Nicole Krauss

She [my mother] was the force around which our world turned. My mother was propelled through the universe by the brute force of reason. She was the judge in all our arguments. One disapproving word from her was enough to send us off to hide in a corner, where we would cry and fantasize our own martyrdom. And yet. One kiss could restore us to princedom. Without her, our lives would dissolve into chaos.
- Nicole Krauss

The judge's massive eyebrows crept up. "Kaldar. Are you the one speaking for the plaintiff today?"
"Yes, Your Honor."
"Well, shit," Dobe said. "I guess you're familiar with the law. You hit it over the head, set its house on fire, and got its sister pregnant.
- Ilona Andrews

The judge who sits over the murderer and looks into his face, and at one moment recognizes all the emotions and potentialities and possibilities of the murderer in his own soul and hears the murderer's voice as his own, is at the next moment one and indivisible as the judge, and scuttles back into the shell of his cultivated self and does his duty and condemns the murderer to death.
- Hermann Hesse

At the end of my trial, I was rather hoping the judge would send me to Australia for the rest of my life.
- Jeffrey Archer

let the speaker speak truly and the judge decide justly.
- Plato

For every crime that comes before him, a judge is required to complete a perfect syllogism in which the major premise must be the general law; the minor, the action that conforms or does not conform to the law; and the conclusion, acquittal or punishment. If the judge were constrained, or if he desired to frame even a single additional syllogism, the door would thereby be opened to uncertainty.
- Cesare Beccaria

Freedom is not a reward or a decoration that you toast in champagne. On the contrary, it's hard graft and a long-distance run, all alone, very exhausting. Alone in a dreary room, alone in the dock before the judges, and alone to make up your mind, before yourself and before the judgement of others. At the end of every freedom there is a sentence, which is why freedom is too heavy to bear.
- Albert Camus

JAG is an acronym for the Judge Advocate General, which is the judicial system of the military.
- Catherine Bell

In England the judges should have independence to protect the people against the crown. Here the judges should not be independent of the people, but be appointed for not more than seven years. The people would always re-elect the good judges.
- Andrew Jackson

The whole discussion now underway on revolutionary forms in Russia and in China boils down to the judgement to be made of the historical phenomenon of the "appearance" of industrialism and mechanisation in huge areas of the world previously dominated by landed and precapitalist forms of production.
Constructing industrialism and mechanising things is supposedly the same as building socialism whenever central and "national" plans are made. This is the mistaken thesis.
- Amadeo Bordiga

In a constitutional democracy the moral content of law must be given by the morality of the framer or legislator, never by the morality of the judge.
- Robert Bork

Who can judge the judge?
- Kami Garcia

You can have many different selection systems, but the bottom line has to be a system that, once the judge takes office that judge will feel that he or she is to decide the case without reference to the popular thing or the popular will of the moment.
- Stephen Breyer

WHAT'S WRONG WITH ASSHOLES, BABY? YOU'VE GOT AN ASSHOLE, I'VE GOT AN ASSHOLE! YOU GO TO THE STORE AND BUY A PORTERHOUSE STEAK, THAT HAS AN ASSHOLE! ASSHOLES COVER THE EARTH! IN A WAY TREES HAVE ASSHOLES BUT YOU CAN'T FIND THEM, THEY JUST DROP THEIR LEAVES. YOUR ASSHOLE, MY ASSHOLE, THE WORLD IS FULL OF BILLIONS OF ASSHOLES. THE PRESIDENT HAS AN ASSHOLE, THE CARWASH BOY HAS AN ASSHOLE, THE JUDGE AND THE MURDERER HAVE ASSHOLES...EVEN PURPLE STICKPIN HAS AN ASSHOLE!
- Charles Bukowski

The not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self.
- Anthony Burgess

...badness is of the self, the one, the you or me on our oddy knockies, and that self is made by old Bog or God and is his great pride and radosty. But the not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self.
- Anthony Burgess

Goats, to the left with you!' the Judge one day will ordain. 'And you, little sheep, stand quietly here on my right!' - Fair enough; but it is to be hoped he will say one thing more, namely: 'As for you, stand right opposite me, you men of sense!
- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

They scribble on notepads,
the sound of their pens
scratching the judgemental air.
- Emma Cameron

Ah, I am the judge of dreams, and you are the judge of love. Well, I find you guilty of dreaming good dreams, and sentence you to a lifetime of working and suffering for the sake of your dreams. I only hope that someday you won't declare me innocent of the crime of loving you.
- Orson Scott Card

Do you think we're making a mistake?" snapped the Bishop.
"Not at all," said Dom Cristao. "I think we've taken a step toward something truly magnificent. But humankind almost never forgives true greatness."
"Fortunately," said the Bishop, "humankind isn't the judge that matters. And now I intend to pray for this boy, since medical science has obviously reached the boundary of its competence.
- Orson Scott Card

So you're Zach." Townsend didn't even try to hide the judgement in his voice as he looked Zach up and down in some sort of silent but dangerous examination.
Zach huffed but smiled. "so you're Townsend."
The two of them stared for a long time, wordless. It felt like I was watching a documentary on the Nature Channel, something about alpha males in the wild.
- Ally Carter

The magistrates are the ministers for the laws, the judges their interpreters, the rest of us are servants of the law, that we all may be free.
- Marcus Tullius Cicero

The president appoints the judges. Your lives and your children's lives can change by all of these appellate court judges who will be appointed who will reinterpret laws, and things can change.
- Johnnie Cochran

My name is unpronounceable in your tongue, woman," it said.
"I'll be the judge of that," warned Granny, and added, "Don't call me woman."
"Very well. My name is WxrtHltl-jwlpklz," said the demon smugly.
- Terry Pratchett

That I can't relate to today's music or morals doesn't make either necessarily bad. Just different. I leave the judgements to others.
- Perry Como

Nothing but vast wisdom and onlimited power should dare sweep men off in multitudes,' he added; 'for it is only the one that can know the necessity of the judgement; and what is there short of the other, that can replace the creatures of the Lord?
- James F Cooper

The judge said I was a menace to society because I had put crime on a scientific basis.
- Gregory Corso

The judge gave Michael permission to issue a statement. I think Jackson went way outside the bounds of the judge's intent. It will be interesting to see what the judge does tomorrow in court.
- Catherine Crier

The judge decided in this case that both the state and the defense would have the opportunity to respond to certain kinds of press. This is one such instance.
- Catherine Crier

We have our responsibilities as readers and even our importance. The standards we raise and the judgements we pass steal in the air and become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work. An influence is created which tells upon them even if it never finds its way into print.
- Virginia Woolf

While teaching, I also worked undercover in the lower courts by saying I was a young law teacher wanting experience in criminal law. The judges were happy to assist me but what I learned was how corrupt the lower courts were. Judges were accepting money right in the courtroom.
- Samuel Dash

(Socialist Powers Hapgood)...had become an official in the CIO. There had been some sort of dust-up on a picket line, and he was testifying about it in court, and the judge stops everything and asks him, "Mr. Hapgwood, here you are, you're a graduate of Harvard. why would anyone with your advantages choose the life than you have?" Hapgood answered the judge: "Why, because of the Sermon on the Mount, sir.
- Kurt Vonnegut

There was no question about it- the girl in the photograph was staggeringly beautiful. She was Miss Canal Zone, a runner-up in the Miss Universe Contest -- and in fact far more beautiful than the winner of the contests. Her beauty had frightened the judges.
- Kurt Vonnegut

A man wasn't equal to an animal, not one particle of him. Human life was stinking corrupt, and meanwhile there were beautiful creatures who lived with delicacy on the earth without doing anyone harm. "We should be dying." the judge almost wept.
- Kiran Desai

Do you spell it with a "V" or a "W"?' inquired the judge. 'That depends upon the taste and fancy of the speller, my Lord'.
- Charles Dickens

Remember especially that you cannot be the judge of anyone. For there can be no judge of a criminal on earth until the judge knows that he, too, is a criminal, exactly the same as the one who stands before him, and that he is perhaps most guilty of all for the crime of the one standing before him.
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Literature is humanity's broad-minded alter-ego, with room in its heart for monsters, even for you. It's humanity without the judgement.
- Glen Duncan

As soon as I got up on that stage, and I remembered how welcoming and warming the judges, their presence is, and it was just all uphill from there.
- James Durbin

What is truth? Truth doesn't really exist. Who is going to judge whether my experience of an incident is more valid than yours? No one can be trusted to be the judge of that.
- Tracey Emin

Is it in the best interest of baseball to sell beer in the ninth inning? Probably not. The rule has got to be more clearly defined. And then some process should be set up where the judge is not also the appeals judge.
- George Steinbrenner

When the judges shall be obliged to go armed, it will be time for the courts to be closed.
- Stephen J Field

Jesus said the weeds would grow with the wheat until the Judgement," Dietrich answered, "so one finds both good men and bad in the Church. By our fruits we will be known, not by what name we have called ourselves. I have come to believe that there is more grace in becoming wheat than there is in pulling weeds.
- Michael Flynn

In 1970, a superior Court judge issues an order forcing the desegregation of Los Angeles schools. The judge survives an assassination attempt and loses his job in the next election.
- James Frey

Kings may be judges of the earth, but wise men are the judges of kings.
- Solomon Ibn Gabirol

At the end of the table, the secretary was reading the decision in some case, but in such a mournful and monotonous voice, that the condemned man himself would have fallen asleep while listening to it. The judge, no doubt, would have been the first of all to do so, had he not entered into an engrossing conversation while it was going on.
- Nikolai Gogol

Defendants are being evaluated based on numerical grid without any aggravating circumstances being considered. The effect has been to transfer the disparity from the judge to the prosecutor allowing for a great deal of leeway on indictments.
- Harold H Greene

I've never met or spoken to David Lee Roth, yet it's rather ironic that even he's saying Eddie's lying about things. I'm saying he's not telling the truth, yet Eddie insists that the two of us are lying! You be the judge.
- Sammy Hagar

Governments that block the aspirations of their people, that steal or are corrupt, that oppress and torture or that deny freedom of expression and human rights should bear in mind that they will find it increasingly hard to escape the judgement of their own people, or where warranted, the reach of international law.
- William Hague

Why was the judgement of the disapproving so valuable? Who said that their good opinions tended to be any more rational than those of generally pleasant people?
- Shannon Hale

I can't read music. Instead, I'd do stuff inside the piano, do harmonics and all kinds of crazy things. They used to put me in these annual piano contests down at Long Beach City College, and two years in a row, I won first prize - out of like 5,000 kids! The judges were like, 'Very interesting interpretation!' I thought I was playing it right.
- Eddie Van Halen

I was just ice skating. I had no concept of that. In those days you couldn't see the judges. I was this little person on the ice and they were just people that would stand around the boards.
- Dorothy Hamill

If the courts are making the decisions, it matters who the judge is and, of course, people are concerned with what is the bottom line.
- John Harrison

What you've done becomes the judge of what you're going to do - especially in other people's minds. When you're traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.
- William Least Heatmoon

When I said I would be the judge of your worth, I did not mean that I owned your life, Rowan Jun. --Garyn Kei
- Tamara Henson

You aren't thinking or really existing unless you're willing to risk even your own sanity in the judgement of your existence.
- Frank Herbert

Like the rabbi with the red circle, she should have said "no" to everything. She should have become a raven. She didn't understand that every word the judge said was a trap, in that every word she said could easily be a stone used to shut her into that trap.
- Alice Hoffman

I want it absolutely clear when I stand before the judgement bar of God that I declared to the world, in the most straightforward language I could summon, that the Book of Mormon is true.
- Jeffrey R Holland

In his dream, George Stetchkin was in the dock at the Central Criminal Court, accused of the murder of nine million innocent brain cells. The usher was showing the jury the alleged murder weapon, an empty Bison Brand wodka bottle. Then the judge glared at him over the rims of his spectacles and sentenced him to the worst hangover of his life.
- Tom Holt

We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is, and the judiciary is the safeguard of our property and our liberty and our property under the Constitution.
- Charles Evans Hughes

The Violence Against Women Act is so important. It provides money to train the cop on the beat, to train the judges that this is a new day, that we won't tolerate this violence and to know how to deal with it.
- Patricia Ireland

It is always easy to question the judgement of others in matters of which we may be imperfectly informed.
- P D James

The hitter can never be the judge. Only the receiver of the blow can tell you how hard it was, whether it would kill a man or make a baby just yawn.
- Edward P Jones

We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth.
- Carl Jung

I went dumpster diving the other day, and each of the judges gave me a perfect score of 10.
- Jarod Kintz

The judge said he was going to throw the book at me. I hoped it was an ebook in the cloud, and not a heavy dictionary.
- Jarod Kintz

The judge is forced for the most part to reach his audience through the medium of the press whose reporting of judicial decisions is all too often inaccurate and superficial.
- Irving R Kaufman

There is nothing anyone can do anyway. The public has no power. The government knows I'm not a criminal. The parole board knows I'm not a criminal. The judge knows I'm not a criminal.
- Jack Kevorkian

The belief in some being who can be the judge of all human matters is a very comfortable one - all wrongs will be righted and all rights will be rewarded.
- Eli Khamarov

We are the recorders and reporters of facts - not the judges of the behaviors we describe.
- Alfred Kinsey

For writers, handing a manuscript off to an editor is like walking into a parole hearing. You've done the time but wonder if it's going to satisfy the judge.
- Shandy L Kurth

Where do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?
- Herman Melville

Who judges the judge who judges wrong?
- Gail Carson Levine

The ancient man approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man, the roles are reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock... the trial may even end in God's acquittal. But the important thing is that Man is on the bench and God in the dock.
- C S Lewis

God it set them yappin on the slope like dogs and he turns to us, the judge, with that smile of his, and he says: Gentlemen. That was all he said.
- Cormac Mccarthy

...He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.
- Cormac Mccarthy

Books lie, he said.
God dont lie.
No, said the judge. He does not. And these are his words.
He held up a chunk of rock.
He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things.
The squatters in their rags nodded among themselves and were soon reckoning him correct, this man of learning, in all his speculations, and this the judge encouraged until they were right proselytes of the new order whereupon he laughed at them for fools.
- Cormac Mccarthy

The judge is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.
- Cormac Mccarthy

Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen the horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance. - The judge
- Cormac Mccarthy

It was the judge and the imbecile. They were both of them naked and they neared through the desert dawn like beings of a mode little more than tangential to the world at large, their figures now quick with clarity and now fugitive in the strangeness of that same light. Like things whose very portent renders them ambiguous. Like things so charged with meaning that their forms are dimmed.
- Cormac Mccarthy

It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.
- Cormac Mccarthy

The judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at his inquisitor. This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation.
- Cormac Mccarthy

The judge watched him. He began to point out various men in the room and to ask if these men were here for a good time or if indeed they knew why they were here at all.
Everybody dont have to have a reason to be someplace.
That's so, said the judge. They do not have to have a reason. But order is not set aside because of their indifference.
- Cormac Mccarthy

The spectacles of pain and disgrace I see around me, the ignorance, the unthinking vice, the poverty and the lack of hope, and oh, the rainthe rain that falls on England and rots the grain, puts out the light in the man's eye and the light of learning too, for who can reason if Oxford is a giant puddle and Cambridge is washing away downstream, and who will enforce the laws if the judges are swimming for their lives?
- Hilary Mantel

Jury - A group of 12 people, who, having lied to the judge about their health, hearing, and business engagements, have failed to fool him.
- H L Mencken

I experienced the judgement of a lot of people - and deservedly so.
- Sienna Miller

At the conclusion of my argument I received very high compliments from the Chief Justice and later from other of the Judges. What they said I do not care to repeat.
- William Henry Moody

So I went in front of the judge, and I had my St. Jude prayer book in my pocket and my St. Jude medal. And I'm standing there and that judge said I was found guilty, so he sentenced me to what the law prescribed: one to 14 years.
- Aaron Neville

At the court hearing, Howard Weitzman told the judge that if they were gonna ban 'Suicide Solution' and hold me responsible for some poor kid shooting himself, then they'd have to ban Shakespeare, 'cos Romeo and Juliet's about suicide, too.
- Ozzy Osbourne

I'm not the judge. You know, God didn't tell me to go around judging everybody.
- Joel Osteen

I'm going to let God be the judge of who goes to heaven and hell.
- Joel Osteen

The Judge does not make the law. It is people that make the law. Therefore if a law is unjust, and if the Judge judges according to the law, that is justice, even if it is not just.
- Alan Paton

well, young man, the judge began, what it biols down to this if the court so desires and if you belive that your home setting is undesirable... you may return and desire with your mother at your home residents
- Dave Pelzer

Wherefore the race being not to the swift, etc. but time and chance happening to all men, I leave the Judgement of the whole to the Candid, of whose correction I shall never be impatient.
- William Petty

I elect to stay on the soil of which I was born and on the plot of ground which I have fairly bought and honestly paid for. Don't advise me to leave, and don't add insult to injury by telling me it's for my own good; of that I am to be the judge.
- Robert Purvis

When undertaking marriage, everyone must be the judge of his own thoughts, and take counsel from himself.
- Francois Rabelais

The door of the judge's house was opened to him by a huge, bearded man who informed the reporter in a conversational tone that if he did not leave the village immediately he would not leave it with his arms unbroken.
- Phil Rickman

So my attorneys brought litigation in the U.S. federal courts. The judge ruled in our favor.
- Jeremy Rifkin

When you make the judgement as a network that there are only three candidates, you are censoring points of view.
- Tim Robbins

I'll be the judge of my own manliness.
- Dennis Rodman

It is hard to prevent oneself from believing what one so keenly desires, and who can doubt that the interest we have in admitting or denying the reality of the Judgement to come determines the faith of most men in accordance with their hopes and fears.
- Jean Jacques Rousseau

I no longer agree to treat myself with disrespect. Every time a self-critical thought comes to mind, I will forgive the Judge and follow this comment with words of praise, self-acceptance, and love.
- Miguel Angel Ruiz

Acceptance means including everything and everyone. It is acknowledging what is and allowing it to be part of the wholeness to which it legitimately belongs no matter what it is. It is devoid of any judgement, and yet it also includes the judgement. It can be strategically located at the heart level, yet this heart level includes all other levels.
- Franco Santoro

The records of adopted children are sealed in California. That seal is considered inviolable... The judge ruled that, because I was famous, he didn't have the same rights as other kids.
- Danielle Steel

The judge arrived half an hour later with the file he had collected from his office on the way, signed several papers, had Sam sign them, the matron witness them; Josh cried, Norm cried, she cried, the judge grinned, and Timmie waved his teddy bear at the judge with a broad grin as they wheeled into the elevator. "So long!" he shouted, and when the doors closed, the judge was laughing and crying too.
- Danielle Steel

You can, if you wish, think of it like the universe: Each case is a sun, and all the judges, lawyers and administrative personnel represent planets revolving around the case in fixed orbit, never getting closer.
- Sol Wachtler

It all began, as I have said, when the Boss, sitting in the black Cadillac which sped through the night, said to me (to Me who was what Jack Burden, the student of history, had grown up to be) "There is always something."
And I said, "Maybe not on the Judge."
And he said, "Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.
- Robert Penn Warren

There's always room for improvement, but the judges are looking for big airs and stylish tricks.
- Shaun White

The Judge is before the door: he that cometh will come, and will not tarry: his reward is with him.
- George Whitefield

As a kid I quite fancied the romantic, Bohemian idea of being an artist. I expect I thought I could escape from the difficulties of maths and spelling. Maybe I thought I would avoid the judgement of the establishment.
- Peter Wright

I do not hold with those who think it is all right to do whatever you want so long as it doesn't hurt anyone. Who's to be the judge of that?
- Loretta Young

A drunk was in front of a judge. The judge says "You've been brought here for drinking." The drunk says "Okay, let's get started.
- Henny Youngman

A jury is always a more orthodox body than any defendant brought before it; for blacks it is usually a whiter group, for poor people, a more prosperous group...
Another lesson about the justice system: the way the judge charges the jury inevitably pushes them one way or the other, limits their independent judgment.
- Howard Zinn

The judge turned his back towards me, sitting back on his judge's chair, while I was in the witness stand being questioned. The whole courtroom was full of these anarchists, leftists, communists and Jewish lobbyists.
- Ernst Zundel