The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes.
If one man can be allowed to determine for himself what is law, every man can. That means first chaos, then tyranny. Legal process is an essential part of the democratic process.
We have enjoyed so much freedom for so long that we are perhaps in danger of forgetting how much blood it cost to establish the Bill of Rights.
It is a wise man who said that there is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals.
The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards.
Anybody who is any good is different from anybody else.
Freedom of speech and of the press are essential to the enlightenment of a free people and in restraining those who wield power.
It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have been forged in controversies involving not very nice people.
Ultimately there can be no freedom for self unless it is vouchsafed for others; there can be no security where there is fear, and a democratic society presupposes confidence and candor in the relations of men with one another and eager collaboration for the larger ends of life instead of the pursuit of petty, selfish or vainglorious aims.
It is hostile to a democratic system to involve the judiciary in the politics of the people.
It is easy to make light of insistence on scrupulous regard for the safeguards of civil liberties when invoked on behalf of the unworthy. It is too easy. History bears testimony that by such disregard are the rights of liberty extinguished, heedlessly at first, then stealthily, and brazenly in the end.
No office in the land is more important than that of being a citizen.
It is important not to give the appearance of a predisposed mind. And it is more important not to let the mind become predisposed.
The most constructive way of resolving conflicts is to avoid them.
All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them.
Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.
It simply is not true that war never settles anything.
Democracy is always a beckoning goal, not a safe harbor. For freedom is an unremitting endeavor, never a final achievement.
It has not been unknown that judges persist in error to avoid giving the appearance of weakness and vacillation.
The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day. It does come, however slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority.
The indispensible judicial requisite is intellectual humility.
The ultimate touchstone of constitutionality is the Constitution itself, and not what we have said about it.
While it is not always profitable to analogize "fact" to "fiction," La Fontaine's fable of the crow, the cheese, and the fox demonstrates that there is a substantial difference between holding a piece of cheese in the beak and putting it in the stomach.
Freedom of expression is the well-spring of our civilization... The history of civilization is in considerable measure the displacement of error which once held sway as official truth by beliefs which in turn have yielded to other truths. Therefore the liberty of man to search for truth ought not to be fettered, no matter what orthodoxies he may challenge.
Fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalised medium of reason, that's all we have between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feelings.
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