A Judge must bear in mind that when he tries a case he is himself on trial.

I am reminded each day that I render decisions that affect people concretely and that I owe them constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives and ensuring that to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities permit me, that I reevaluate them and change as circumstances and cases before me requires. I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences but I accept my limitations. I willingly accept that we who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage but attempt, as the Supreme Court suggests, continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate. There is always a danger embedded in relative morality, but since judging is a series of choices that we must make, that I am forced to make, I hope that I can make them by informing myself on the questions I must not avoid asking and continuously pondering.

For me, very little gets to me, except to do my work that I have to do and I must say up till now, I still believe that 99.99% of the judiciary from magistrates all the way to the Chief Justice, they are there to simply do their work.

My duty is, as a Judge, to be governed by fixed rules and former precedents.

The difficulty which I feel as a Judge, and always felt at the Bar, is this: a defendant is entitled to put his back against the wall and to fight from every available point of advantage.

I am not the law, but I represent justice so far as my feeble powers go.

I am conscious of my shortcomings, but I have always tried as an honest worker to a do a job to the best of my ability and judgment.

We have a government of limited power under the Constitution, and we have got to work out our problems on the basis of law.

The more necessary anything appears to my mind, the most certain it is that I only assert a limitation.

Whatever might have been my opinion, had this been a new case, I must hold myself bound by decided cases.

For my life, I confess to you, feels to me today somewhat narrow and circumscribed.

I do take law very seriously, deeply seriously, because fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalized medium of reason, that's all we have standing between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feeling.

I am conscious of being only an individual struggling weakly against the stream of time. But it still remains in my power to contribute in such a way that, when the theory of gases is again revived, not too much will have to be rediscovered.

The most important thing that a clerk can do for a judge, I tell my clerks, is to prevent me from jumping off the cliff if I don’t want to. That is, sometimes I don’t realize there’s a cliff there at all, that the implications of what I’m doing are really totally wrong, and that sometimes it takes another person or two other people to warn me that you’re just not reading this case correctly, or you’re just not understanding the implications of what a decision in this way would be.”