Daily Inspiration Quote by Potter Stewart

A judge admitting linguistic defeat and calling it jurisprudence is a very American kind of candor. Potter Stewart's line, from a 1964 Supreme Court case about obscenity (Jacobellis v. Ohio), lands because it punctures the fantasy that law can always translate messy human experience into clean categories. Stewart refuses to "define" hard-core pornography, then pivots to a sensory authority: "I know it when I see it". The move is half shrug, half flex.

The specific intent is tactical. The Court was tangled in First Amendment doctrine, trying to separate protected speech from punishable obscenity. Stewart signals that any rigid definition will be gamed, ridiculed, or rendered obsolete by changing art forms and sexual norms. So he offers an operational test: not a rule you can memorize, but a judgment call you can recognize.

The subtext is more unsettling: the law's supposed objectivity quietly depends on the judge's intuitions, cultural literacy, and biases. "I" does a lot of work here. It asks the public to trust the decency and discernment of an unelected arbiter, while sidestepping the question of whose "seeing" counts. That subjectivity can function as a safeguard against overbroad censorship, but it can also legitimize arbitrary enforcement, especially against marginalized artists and communities.

What makes the line endure is its blunt theatricality. Stewart turns doctrinal confusion into a quotable epigram, and in doing so, reveals the real mechanism of many legal standards: not certainty, but confidence performed in public.