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Quotes by Judge
"Criticism of government finds sanctuary in several portions of the 1st Amendment. It is part of the right of free speech. It embraces freedom of the press."
43
"I take judge-made law as one of the existing realities of life."
43
"I don't know one of my friends who is considered a conservative who has not had to go back and thoroughly think through everything. You do a lot of soul-searching - 'cause we are not going to win any popularity contests."
43
"The judge is forced for the most part to reach his audience through the medium of the press whose reporting of judicial decisions is all too often inaccurate and superficial."
43
"Our religion, then, rests on the credit due to these witnesses."
43
"The aim of law is the maximum gratification of the nervous system of man."
43
"The ultimate touchstone of constitutionality is the Constitution itself and not what we have said about it."
43
"A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions."
43
"I have to admit that I'm one of those people that thinks the dishwasher is a miracle."
43
"Young women today often have very little appreciation for the real battles that took place to get women where they are today in this country. I don't know how much history young women today know about those battles."
43
"Shakespeare's idea of the tragic fact is larger than this idea and goes beyond it; but it includes it, and it is worth while to observe the identity of the two in a certain point which is often ignored."
42
"We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe."
42
"I have a lifetime appointment and I intend to serve it. I expect to die at 110, shot by a jealous husband."
42
"When police or prosecutors conceal significant exculpatory or impeaching material, we hold, it is ordinarily incumbent on the state to set the record straight."
42
"Most people, even among those who know Shakespeare well and come into real contact with his mind, are inclined to isolate and exaggerate some one aspect of the tragic fact."
42
"Death is not only an unusually severe punishment, unusual in its pain, in its finality and in its enormity, but is serves no penal purpose more effectively than a less severe punishment."
42
"We do not consecrate the flag by punishing its desecration, for in doing so, we dilute the freedom this cherished emblem represents."
42
"Any discrimination, like sharp turns in a road, becomes critical because of the tremendous speed at which we are traveling into the high-tech world of a service economy."
42
"To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man."
42
"The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes."
42
"And in that confirmation process, I sat for 17 hours in front of a senate judiciary committee."
42
"One who comes to the Court must come to adore, not to protest. That's the new gloss on the 1st Amendment."
42
"When I went to law school, which after all was back in the dark ages, we never looked beyond our borders for precedents. As a state court judge, it never would have occurred to me to do so, and when I got to the Supreme Court, it was very much the same. We just didn't do it."
42
"The blessings we evoke for another descend upon ourselves."
42
"The House is rooted in the principle of direct elections and is unique among all branches and bodies of the federal government as without exception, the people's voice."
42
"War should be made a crime, and those who instigate it should be punished as criminals."
42
"There should be a readiness, on our part, to investigate with candor to follow the truth wherever it may lead us, and to submit, without reserve or objection, to all the teachings of this religion, if it be found to be of divine origin."
42
"Every event that a man would master must be mounted on the run, and no man ever caught the reins of a thought except as it galloped past him."
42
"We've talked more about civil rights after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than we talked about it before 1964."
41
"A child born to a Black mother in a state like Mississippi... has exactly the same rights as a white baby born to the wealthiest person in the United States. It's not true, but I challenge anyone to say it is not a goal worth working for."
41
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