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. John Roberts Read Quote
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. John Roberts Read Quote
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. John Roberts Read Quote
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. John Roberts Read Quote
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. John Roberts Read Quote
I vividly remember my first day on the White House staff. My office, of course, was in the Old Executive Office Building. I didn’t rate one in the West Wing; but don’t try to tell me or any of the rest of us working there that we weren’t working in the White House. John Roberts Read Quote
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. John Roberts Read Quote
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?’ John Roberts Read Quote
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. John Roberts Read Quote
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.’ John Roberts Read Quote
