Sometimes it is easy... to enhance your prestige by not exercising your responsibility, but that's not been the tradition of the court.

As the Constitution endures, persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom.

Asking questions is an essential part of police investigation. In the ordinary sense a police officer is free to ask a person for identification without implicating the Fourth Amendment.

The case for freedom, the case for our constitutional principles the case for our heritage has to be made anew in each generation. The work of freedom is never done.

Sometimes it is easy... to enhance your prestige by not exercising your responsibility, but that's not been the tradition of the court.

Democracy is something that you must learn each generation. It has to be taught.

I do not think that we should select judges based on a particular philosophy as opposed to temperament, commitment to judicial neutrality and commitment to other more constant values as to which there is general consensus.

In the political context fair means somebody that will vote for the unions or for the business. It can't mean that in the judicial context or we're in real trouble.

No one questions the validity, the urgency, the essentiality of the Voting Rights Act.

The First Amendment is often inconvenient. But that is beside the point. Inconvenience does not absolve the government of its obligation to tolerate speech.

The remedy for speech that is false is speech that is true. This is the ordinary course in a free society. The response to the unreasoned is the rational; to the uninformed, the enlightened; to the straight-out lie, the simple truth.

We must never lose sight of the fact that the law has a moral foundation, and we must never fail to ask ourselves not only what the law is, but what the law should be.

You have plaintiffs attorneys, you have defense attorneys. So there is no unified bar that will protect a particular judge who has made a courageous decision that's unpopular.

Theres a time for debate and a time for consensus. Theres a time for advocacy and time for first principles.

First Amendment freedoms are most in danger when the government seeks to control thought or to justify its laws for that impermissible end. The right to think is the beginning of freedom and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought.

No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were.

As a member of this court I am not justified in writing my private notions of policy into the Constitution, no matter how deeply I may cherish them or how mischievous I may deem their disregard.

The court of last resort is no longer the Supreme Court. It's "Nightline."

I would not like to be the only woman on the court.

There are certain promises you make that are more sacred than anything that happens in a court of law, I don't care how many Bibles you put your hand on.

Towards the end of the Lord Chamberlain's era, when his hold was being loosened, private prosecutions began to happen. A member of staff at the Royal Court ordered to stop the play, and the police were brought in.

If in any divination the Tenth Card should be a Court Card, it shews that the subject of the divination falls ultimately into the hands of a person represented by that card, and its end depends mainly on him.

All of our affairs, since the union of crowns, have been managed by the advice of English ministers, and the principal offices of the kingdom filled with such men, as the court of England knew would be subservient to their designs.

One camp accepts the Court's limits on contributions but urges the reinstatement of spending caps - even if this requires a constitutional amendment subjecting political speech, if not pornography, to government regulation.

There is no person in this room whose basic rights are not involved in any successful defiance to the carrying out of court orders.

The court is like a palace of marble; it's composed of people very hard and very polished.

I always try to keep a pretty conservative demeanor on the court.

I didn't know how much I cared about having a woman on the court until the day there was a woman on the court.

And there had to be a dagger thrust in the heart of the left to tell them that you are no longer gonna give five years for a Smith Act prosecution or one year for Contempt of Court, but we're gonna kill ya!

I don't play full court anymore. I just play half-court.

Many words are not wanting to show that the particular view of each court occasioned the dangers which affected the public tranquillity; yet the whole is charged to my account. Nor is this sufficient.

You get a lawyer whether you're in a military tribunal or whether you're in a federal court, number one. The attorney general decided that the court with the biggest - with the greatest venue, with the best jurisdiction was the New York court. That was the right decision to make.

All the culture war issues will be settled by the court.

I got the chance to argue my first case in Supreme Court, a criminal case arising in Alabama that involved the right of a defendant to counsel at a critical stage in a capital case before a trial.

If it gets to the Supreme Court, I'll have the directors of every museum in the country as expert testimony that my work is legitimate art.

I could see flames from the windows of my chambers. For the next three or four days we had major rioting here in Washington and I stayed at the court day and night.

Five guys on the court working together can achieve more than five talented individuals who come and go as individuals.

The family is a court of justice which never shuts down for night or day.

Most people compliment me on maintaining my femininity while I'm on the court. People like the fact that I model. My fans or little girls always say they want to play sports, but also want to be a model like me and I think that's great.

There is - you know, there's receipts for rented cars and license plates and guns and hand prints and palm prints and fingerprints. You know, I want to wait until I'm in a court.

The best servants of the people, like the best valets, must whisper unpleasant truths in the master's ear. It is the court fool, not the foolish courtier, whom the king can least afford to lose.

It lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it. While it lies there, it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.

Do we want an Attorney General who will play politics with the law, play politics with the court and just play politics with international conventions designed to protect our troops? I do not want to play that kind of politics. I am going to vote against Alberto Gonzales.

I said in court a long time ago that I didn't see that the Soviet Union was significantly helped by the information I gave them, nor that the United States was significantly harmed.

When a nominee for the Supreme Court, one of only nine lifetime appointments, makes an overtly brazen racist comment about tens of millions of American citizens, we don't need lectures. What we need to do is to confront her with what she said and what it says about her.

When the Supreme Court moved to Washington in 1800, it was provided with no books, which probably accounts for the high quality of early opinions.

Home court changes everything. If you have home court, you're expected to win.

There is a movement to get an international criminal court in the world, voted for by hundreds of states-but with the noticeable absence of the United States of America.

There is such a thing as tempting the gods. Talking too much, too soon and with too much self-satisfaction has always seemed to me a sure way to court disaster. The forces of retribution are always listening. They never sleep.