Jeffrey Toobin · 384 pages
Rating: (14.2K votes)
“The result always mattered more than the rhetoric.”
― Jeffrey Toobin, quote from The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court
“He did what good lawyers always do. He shifted his argument in the direction his audience was already going.”
― Jeffrey Toobin, quote from The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court
“Toughened or coarsened by their worldly lives, the other dissenters could shrug and move on, but Souter couldn't. His whole life was being a judge.”
― Jeffrey Toobin, quote from The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court
“He denounced self-pity and pitied himself.”
― Jeffrey Toobin, quote from The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court
“Rehnquist was just reflecting his shifting role, from outsider to the institutional embodiment of the Court.”
― Jeffrey Toobin, quote from The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court
“There were two kinds of cases before the Supreme Court. There were abortion cases—and there were all the others.
Abortion was (and is) the central legal issue before the Court. It defined the judicial philosophies of the justices. It dominated the nomination and confirmation process. It nearly delineated the difference between the national Democratic and Republican parties.”
― Jeffrey Toobin, quote from The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court
“Purple prose attracts attention more than converts.”
― Jeffrey Toobin, quote from The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court
“He saw the Constitution as the vehicle to keep ecumenical passions in check.”
― Jeffrey Toobin, quote from The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court
“The dilemma facing Bush and the Republicans was clear. If Marshall left, they could not leave the Supreme Court an all-white institution; at the same time, they had to choose a nominee who would stay true to the conservative cause. The list of plausible candidates who fit both qualifications pretty much began and ended with Clarence Thomas.
… There was awkwardness about the selection from the start. "The fact that he is black and a minority has nothing to do with this," Bush said. "He is the best qualified at this time." The statement was self-evidently preposterous; Thomas had served as a judge for only a year and, before that, displayed few of the customary signs of professional distinction that are the rule for future justices. For example, he had never argued a single case in any federal appeals court, much less in the Supreme Court; he had never written a book, an article, or even a legal brief of any consequence. Worse, Bush's endorsement raised themes that would haunt not only Thomas's confirmation hearings but also his tenure as a justice. Like the contemporary Republican Party as a whole, Bush and Thomas opposed preferential treatment on account of race—and Bush had chosen Thomas in large part because of his race. The contradiction rankled.”
― Jeffrey Toobin, quote from The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court
Jeffrey Toobin
Born place: in New York, New York, The United States
Born date May 21, 1960
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“The great trains are going out all over Europe, one by one, but still, three times a week, the Orient Express thunders superbly over the 1,400 miles of glittering steel track between Istanbul and Paris.
Under the arc-lights, the long-chassied German locomotive panted quietly with the labored breath of a dragon dying of asthma. Each heavy breath seemed certain to be the last. Then came another.”
― Ian Fleming, quote from From Russia With Love
“She felt like a baton getting passed along in a relay race, completely devoid of any control over her destiny.”
― Gretchen McNeil, quote from Possess
“We all know the elementary form of politeness, that of the empty symbolic gesture, a gesture-an offer-which is meant to be rejected. In John Irving's A Prayer for
Owen Meany, after the little boy Owen accidentally kills John's-his best friend's, the narrator's-mother, he is, of course, terribly upset, so, to show how sorry he is, he discreetly delivers to John a gift of the complete collection of color photos of baseball stars, his most precious possession; however, Dan, John's delicate stepfather, tells him that the proper thing to do is to return the gift. What we have here is symbolic exchange at its purest: a gesture made to be rejected; the point, the "magic" of symbolic exchange, is that, although at the end we are where we were at the beginning, the overall result of the operation is not zero but a distinct gain for both parties, the pact of solidarity. And is not something similar part of our everyday mores? When, after being engaged in a fierce competition for a job promotion with my closest friend, I win, the proper thing to do is to offer to withdraw, so that he will get the promotion, and the proper thing for him to do is to reject my offer-in this way, perhaps, our friendship can be saved....
Milly's offer is the very opposite of such an elementary gesture of politeness: although it also is an offer that is meant to be rejected, what makes hers different from the symbolic empty offer is the cruel alternative it imposes on its addressee: I offer you wealth as the supreme proof of my saintly kindness, but if you accept my offer, you will be marked by an indelible stain of guilt and moral corruption; if you do the right thing and reject it, however, you will also not be simply righteous-your very rejection will function as a retroactive admission of your guilt, so whatever Kate and Densher do, the very choice Milly's bequest confronts them with makes them guilty.”
― Slavoj Žižek, quote from The Parallax View
“the value of work? Have I taught them self-reliance? Have I taught them to take care of each”
― Douglas Preston, quote from The Codex
“Ultimately we are only as old as we feel in our hearts and minds.”
― Thomas Mann, quote from Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories
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