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Our forefathers found the evils of free thinking more to be endured than the evils of inquest or suppression. This is because thoughtful, bold and independent minds are essential to wide and considered self-government.

— Robert H. Jackson

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Mind

More quotes by Robert H. Jackson

We can afford no liberties with liberty itself.

Procedural fairness, if not all that originally was meant by due process of law, is at least what it most uncompromisingly requires.

But when notice is a person's due, process which is a mere gesture is not 'due process.'

Not every defeat of authority is a gain for individual freedom, nor every judicial rescue of a convict a victory for liberty.

The Task of Maintaining Our Liberties: The Role of the Judiciary (1953)

A confession is wholly and incontestably voluntary only if a guilty person gives himself up to the law and becomes his own accuser.

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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

Kenneth Boulding to Kenneth Boulding in: United States. Congress. House (1973)

The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error.

Friedrich Schiller On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794)

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

George Bernard Shaw Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Robert H. Jackson (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.