The Quotes canon
Sourced and curated.
Every quote has been curated by hand and carefully authenticated.
Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Louis Brandeis9 quotes
The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding. — Louis Brandeis · 1928They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone—the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men. — Louis Brandeis · 1928The Court bows to the lessons of experience and the force of better reasoning, recognizing that the process of trial and error, so fruitful in the physical sciences, is appropriate also in the judicial function. — Louis Brandeis · 1932It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country. — Louis Brandeis · 1932Fear of serious injury alone cannot justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burned women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears. — Louis Brandeis · 1927If we would guide by the light of reason, we must let our minds be bold. — Louis Brandeis · 1924All 9 quotes →William J. Brennan, Jr.9 quotes
If the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child. — William J. Brennan, Jr. · 1972Whether, to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material, taken as a whole, appeals to prurient interest. — William J. Brennan, Jr. · 1957All ideas having even the slightest redeeming social importance—unorthodox ideas, controversial ideas, even ideas hateful to the prevailing climate of opinion—have the full protection of the guaranties... But implicit in the history of the First Amendment is the rejection of obscenity as utterly without redeeming social importance... We hold that obscenity is not within the area of constitutionally protected speech or press. — William J. Brennan, Jr. · 1957We hold that obscenity is not within the area of constitutionally protected speech or press. — William J. Brennan, Jr. · 1957The constitutional guarantees require, we think, a federal rule that prohibits a public official from recovering damages for a defamatory falsehood relating to his official conduct unless he proves that the statement was made with "actual malice"—that is, with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not. — William J. Brennan, Jr. · 1964The chilling effect upon the exercise of First Amendment rights may derive from the fact of the prosecution, unaffected by the prospects of its success or failure. — William J. Brennan, Jr. · 1965All 9 quotes →John Marshall8 quotes
The government of the United States has been emphatically termed a government of laws, and not of men. — John Marshall · 1803It is emphatically the province and duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is... If two laws conflict with each other, the Courts must decide on the operation of each... This is of the very essence of judicial duty. — John Marshall · 1803Certainly all those who have framed written Constitutions contemplate them as forming the fundamental and paramount law of the nation, and consequently the theory of every such government must be that an act of the Legislature repugnant to the Constitution is void. — John Marshall · 1803We must never forget that it is a Constitution we are expounding. — John Marshall · 1819The power to tax involves the power to destroy. — John Marshall · 1819The people made the Constitution, and the people can unmake it. It is the creature of their will, and lives only by their will. — John Marshall · 1821All 8 quotes →Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.8 quotes
Taxes are what we pay for civilized society. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. · 1927If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. · 1929It will need more than the Nineteenth Amendment to convince me that there are no differences between men and women, or that legislation cannot take those differences into account. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. · 1923A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought, and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. · 1918But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. · 1919The government ought not to use evidence obtained and only obtainable, by a criminal act...for my part I think it a less evil that some criminals could escape than that, the Government should play an ignoble part. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. · 1928All 8 quotes →William Blackstone7 quotes
The king, moreover, is not only incapable of doing wrong, but even of thinking wrong: he can never mean to do an improper thing: in him is no folly or weakness. — William Blackstone · 1765Man was formed for society. — William Blackstone · 1765Whence it is that in our law the goodness of a custom depends upon its having been used time out of mind; or, in the solemnity of our legal phrase, time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary. — William Blackstone · 1765All presumptive evidence of felony should be admitted cautiously; for the law holds, that it is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer. — William Blackstone · 1769That the king can do no wrong, is a necessary and fundamental principle of the English constitution. — William Blackstone · 1765The offense of riding or going armed, with dangerous or unusual weapons, is a crime against the public peace, by terrifying the good people of the land. — William Blackstone · 1769All 7 quotes →Robert H. Jackson5 quotes
The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials, and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One's right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections. — Robert H. Jackson · 1943There is no doubt that, if there were a super-Supreme Court, a substantial proportion of our reversals of state courts would also be reversed. We are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final. — Robert H. Jackson · 1953The day that this country ceases to be free for irreligion, it will cease to be free for religion—except for the sect that can win political power. — Robert H. Jackson · 1952It is not the function of our Government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the Government from falling into error. — Robert H. Jackson · 1950If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. — Robert H. Jackson · 1943Learned Hand4 quotes
Any one may so arrange his affairs that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which will best pay the Treasury. — Learned Hand · 1934Political agitation, by the passions it arouses or the convictions it engenders, may in fact stimulate men to the violation of law. Detestation of existing policies is easily transformed into forcible resistance of the authority which puts them in execution, and it would be folly to disregard the causal relation between tire two. Yet to assimilate agitation, legitimate as such, with direct incitement to violent resistance, is to disregard the tolerance of all methods of political agitation which in normal times is a safeguard of free government. — Learned Hand · 1917Right conclusions are more likely to be gathered out of a multitude of tongues, than through any kind of authoritative selection. To many this is, and will always be, folly; but we have staked upon it our all. — Learned Hand · 1943Our procedure has been always haunted by the ghost of the innocent man convicted. It is an unreal dream. What we need to fear is the archaic formalism and the watery sentiment that obstructs, delays, and defeats the prosecution of crime. — Learned Hand · 1923Benjamin Cardozo3 quotes
Of that freedom one may say that it is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom. — Benjamin Cardozo · 1937It was framed upon the theory that the peoples of the several states must sink or swim together, and that, in the long run, prosperity and salvation are in union, and not division. — Benjamin Cardozo · 1935Immunities that are valid as against the federal government by force of the specific pledges of particular amendments have been found to be implicit in the concept of ordered liberty, and thus, through the Fourteenth Amendment, become valid as against the states. — Benjamin Cardozo · 1937Edward Coke3 quotes
The house of everyone is to him as his castle and fortress, as well for his defence against injury and violence, as for his repose — Edward Coke · 1603Reason is the life of the law, nay the common law itself is nothing else but reason. — Edward Coke · 1628How long soever it hath continued, if it be against reason, it is of no force in law. — Edward Coke · 1628Felix Frankfurter3 quotes
The history of liberty has largely been the history of observance of procedural safeguards. — Felix Frankfurter · 1943In a democratic society like ours, relief must come through an aroused popular conscience that sears the conscience of the people's representatives. — Felix Frankfurter · 1962It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have frequently been forged in controversies involving not very nice people. — Felix Frankfurter · 1950William O. Douglas3 quotes
In other words, the First Amendment has a penumbra where privacy is protected from governmental intrusion. — William O. Douglas · 1965The foregoing cases suggest that specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance… Various guarantees create zones of privacy. — William O. Douglas · 1965The conception of political equality from the Declaration of Independence, to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, to the Fifteenth, Seventeenth, and Nineteenth Amendments can mean only one thing—one person, one vote. — William O. Douglas · 1963Antonin Scalia2 quotes
Campaign promises are-by long democratic tradition-the least binding form of human commitment. — Antonin Scalia · 2002Frequently an issue of this sort will come before the Court clad, so to speak, in sheep's clothing: the potential of the asserted principle to effect important change in the equilibrium of power is not immediately evident, and must be discerned by a careful and perceptive analysis. But this wolf comes as a wolf. — Antonin Scalia · 1988Earl Warren2 quotes
To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone... We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. — Earl Warren · 1954Prior to any questioning, the person must be warned that he has a right to remain silent, that any statement he does make may be used as evidence against him, and that he has a right to the presence of an attorney, either retained or appointed. — Earl Warren · 1966Harry A. Blackmun2 quotes
This right of privacy...is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy. — Harry A. Blackmun · 1973In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently. — Harry A. Blackmun · 1978Hugo Black2 quotes
The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach. — Hugo Black · 1947An unconditional right to say what one pleases about public affairs is what I consider to be the minimum guarantee of the First Amendment. — Hugo Black · 1964John Marshall Harlan2 quotes
The arbitrary separation of citizens on the basis of race while they are on a public highway is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and the equality before the law established by the Constitution... We boast of the freedom enjoyed by our people above all other peoples. But it is difficult to reconcile that boast with a state of the law which, practically, puts the brand of servitude and degradation upon a large class of our fellow citizens, our equals before the law. The thin disguise of "equal" accommodations for passengers in railroad coaches will not mislead anyone, nor atone for the wrong this day done. — John Marshall Harlan · 1896Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. — John Marshall Harlan · 1896Sandra Day O'Connor2 quotes
We have long since made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation's citizens. — Sandra Day O'Connor · 2004We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today. — Sandra Day O'Connor · 2003Thurgood Marshall2 quotes
If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a State has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch. — Thurgood Marshall · 1969The measure of a country's greatness is its ability to retain compassion in times of crisis. — Thurgood Marshall · 1972Alberto Gonzales1 quote
In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions. — Alberto Gonzales · 2002Alexander M. Bickel1 quote
No society, certainly not a large and heterogenous one, can fail in time to explode if it is deprived of the arts of compromise, if it knows no ways of muddling through. No good society can be unprincipled; and no viable society can be principle-ridden. — Alexander M. Bickel · 1962Anthony Kennedy1 quote
These men and women...ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right. — Anthony Kennedy · 2015David J. Brewer1 quote
That woman's physical structure and the performance of maternal functions place her at a disadvantage in the struggle for subsistence is obvious. This is especially true when the burdens of motherhood are upon her... As healthy mothers are essential to vigorous offspring, the physical wellbeing of woman becomes an object of public interest and care in order to preserve the strength and vigor of the race. — David J. Brewer · 1908G.K. Chesterton1 quote
Our civilization has decided, and very justly decided, that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men.... When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. — G.K. Chesterton · 1909Gordon Hewart1 quote
A long line of cases shows that it is not merely of some importance, but is of fundamental importance that justice should not only be done, but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done. — Gordon Hewart · 1924Henry Billings Brown1 quote
Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences, and the attempt to do so can only result in accentuating the difficulties of the present situation. — Henry Billings Brown · 1896John Paul Stevens1 quote
Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law. — John Paul Stevens · 2000John Roberts1 quote
The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. — John Roberts · 2007Joseph P. Bradley1 quote
Man is, or should be, woman's protector and defender. The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life. The Constitution of the family organization, which is founded in the divine ordinance, as well as the nature of things, indicates the domestic sphere as that which properly belongs to the domain and functions of womanhood... The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfil the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator. — Joseph P. Bradley · 1873Justinian I1 quote
Justice is the constant and perpetual wish to render to every one his due. — Justinian I · 533Lewis F. Powell, Jr.1 quote
Under the First Amendment there is no such thing as a false idea. However pernicious an opinion may seem, we depend for its correction not on the conscience of judges and juries but on the competition of other ideas. — Lewis F. Powell, Jr. · 1974