Jurist Quotations File

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The Library's Constitution Room is a designated public forum, and no compelling state interest has been advanced to support the exclusion of plaintiff from using it.
--U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman

It is vital that at all times governments anchor in law their response to terrorism. To suggest otherwise, to disregard the law or to carve out improper exceptions, as has been attempted by many governments, would lead to a steady erosion of fundamental rights and, ultimately, undermine the legitimacy of government action itself.
--Louise Arbour, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and former Supreme Court of Canada Justice, 23 Jun 2006

International law requires that the prohibition of torture be ensured by active measures: in addition to not engaging in acts of torture themselves, states have a positive obligation to protect individuals from exposure to torture ... Whatever its asserted effectiveness, torture de-legitimizes state action to the point where the state can no longer assert its moral authority.
--Louise Arbour, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and former Supreme Court of Canada Justice, 23 Jun 2006

It is very American to make money. Between anti-censorship and the desire to make money, the desire to make money will win out.
--Jack Balkin, law school professor, 2002

All too frequently, common sense is a way the majority imposes its prejudice. It codifies the biases of the dominant ideology.
--C. Edwin Baker, professor of constitutional law, quoted in Common Sense, pg 173

I dissent because the Constitution does not allow a small group of passersby to censor, through their complaints, the content of a peaceful, stationary protest. The First Amendment knows no heckler's veto, even in an abortion case.
--Judge C. Arlen Beam, 26 Jul 2004,

Jose Manuel Miguel Xaviar Gonzales, in a few short weeks it will be spring. The snows of winter will flow away, the ice will vanish, the air will become soft and balmy.

In short, Jose Manuel Miguel Xaviar Gonzales, the annual miracle of the years will awaken and come to pass.

But you won't be there.

The rivulet will run its soaring course to the sea. The timid desert flowers will put forth their tender shoots. The glorious valleys of this imperial domain will blossom as the rose.

Still, you will not be here to see.

From every treetop, some wild woods songster will carol his mating song. Butterflies will sport in the sunshine. The gentle breeze will tease the tassels of the wild grasses, and all nature, Jose Manuel Miguel Xaviar Gonzales, will be glad.

But you will not be here to enjoy it. Because I command the sheriff to lead you away to some remote spot, swing you by the neck from a knotting bough of some sturdy oak and let you hang until dead.

And then Jose Manuel Miguel Xaviar Gonzales, I further command that such officer retire quickly from your dangling corpse, that the vultures may descend from the heavens upon your filthy body until nothing shall remain but bare, bleached bones of a cold-blooded, bloodthirsty, throat-cutting, murdering SOB.
--(Hanging) Judge Roy Bean, 1881

As to the evil which results from a censorship, it is impossible to measure it, for it is impossible to tell where it ends.
--Jeremy Bentham, jurist and philosopher (1748-1832)

Secrecy, being an instrument of conspiracy, ought never to be the system of a regular government.
--Jeremy Bentham, jurist and philosopher (1748-1832)

The government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of the government and inform the people.
--Justice Hugo Black, the Pentagon Papers ruling, 30 Jun 1971

Paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent [a] part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.
--Hugo Black, former U.S. Supreme Court justice, 1971

[T]he First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public, that a free press is a condition of a free society.
--Justice Hugo Black, Associated Press v. US, 1945

My view is, without deviation, without exception, without any ifs, buts, or whereases, that freedom of speech means that government shall not do anything to people ... either for the views they have or the views they express or the words they speak or write.
--Hugo L. Black, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, in a lecture at Harvard, 1968

Freedom of speech means that you shall not do something to people either for the views they have, or the views they express, or the words they speak or write.
--Hugo L. Black, U.S. Supreme Court Justice 1963

Freedom to speak and write about public questions is as important to the life of our government as is the heart to the human body. In fact, this privilege is the heart of our government. If that heart be weakened, the result is debilitation; if it be stilled, the result is death.
--Hugo L. Black, U.S. Supreme Court justice, 1942

This trend must be halted if we are to keep faith with the Founders of our Nation and pass on to future generations of Americans the great heritage of freedom which they sacrificed so much to leave to us.

The choice is clear to me. If we are to pass on that great heritage of freedom, we must return to the original language of the Bill of Rights. We must not be afraid to be free.
--Justice Hugo Black to write in a 1961 Supreme Court decision

The "establishment of religion" clause of the First Amendment means at least this: Neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another.

Neither can force nor influence a person to go to or to remain away from church against his will or force him to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion. No person can be punished for entertaining or professing religious beliefs or disbeliefs, for church attendance or non-attendance.

No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion. Neither a state nor the Federal Government can, openly or secretly, participate in the affairs of any religious organizations or groups and vice versa.

In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect "a wall of separation between church and State".
--Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, former Baptist Sunday school teacher, Everson v. Board of Education, 10 Feb 2007

I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed. I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.
--Harry A. Blackmun, U.S. Supreme Court justice, 1994, twenty years after voting to reinstate the death penalty, and quoted in Freakonomics, pg 125

It will be asked whether one would care to have one's young daughter read these books. I suppose that by the time she is old enough to wish to read them she will have learned the biologic facts of life and the words that go with them. There is something seriously wrong at home if those facts have not been met and faced and sorted by then; it is not children so much as parents that should receive our concern about this. I should prefer that my own three daughters meet the facts of life and the literature of the world in my library than behind a neighbor's barn, for I can face the adversary there directly. If the young ladies are appalled by what they read, they can close the book at the bottom of page one; if they read further, they will learn what is in the world and in its people, and no parents who have been discerning with their children need fear the outcome. Nor can they hold it back, for life is a series of little battles and minor issues, and the burden of choice is on us all, every day, young and old.
--Judge Curtis Bok, Commonwealth v. Gordon, 66 Pa. D. & C. 101, 110.

The American press is extraordinarily free and vigorous, as it should be. It should be, not because it is free of inaccuracy, oversimplification and bias, but because the alternative to that freedom is worse than those failings.
--Judge Robert Bork, 1985

With freedom of the press goes the freedom to read or to close the book, and it will linger so long as we retain the power to say no.
--Justice Curtis Bok, Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, 1954

The matter does not appear to me now as it appears to have appeared to me then.
--Baron Bramwell, 19th century British judge

Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law.
--Louis D. Brandeis, lawyer, judge, and writer (1856-1941)

Those who won our independence ... knew that ... fear breeds repression and that courage is the secret of liberty.
--Justice Louis Brandeis

Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purpose is beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
--Louis Brandeis, lawyer, judge, and writer (1856-1941)

The most important political office is that of private citizen.
--Louis Brandeis, lawyer, judge, writer (1856-1941)

If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and the fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.
--Louis Brandeis, lawyer, judge, writer (1856-1941)

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.
--Louis Brandeis, U.S. Supreme Court justice, 1928

Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.
--Louis Dembitz Brandeis, 1856-1941

If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
--Louis Dembitz Brandeis, 1856-1941

If we would guide by the light of reason we must let our minds be bold.
--Louis Dembitz Brandeis, 1856-1941

America has believed that in differentiation, not in uniformity, lies the path of progress. It acted on this belief; it has advanced human happiness, and it has prospered.
--Louis Dembitz Brandeis, 1856-1941

Government is not an exact science.
--Louis Dembitz Brandeis, 1856-1941

The freedom of individuals verbally to oppose or challenge police action without thereby risking arrest is one of the principal characteristics by which we distinguish a free nation from a police state.
--Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, 1987

We can imagine . . . no better way to counter a flag-burner's message than by saluting the flag that burns. . . We do not consecrate the flag by punishing its desecration, for in doing so we dilute the freedom that this cherished emblem represents.
--William J. Brennan, Jr. Texas v. Johnson, 1989

The First Amendment rights of students may be directly and sharply implicated by the removal of books from the shelves of a school library.
--Justice William Brennan, U.S. Supreme Court, Island Trees v. Pico, 25 Jun 1986

In brief, we hold that local school boards may not remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books and seek by their removal to 'prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of public opinion.'
--Justice William Brennan, U.S. Supreme Court, Island Trees v. Pico, 25 Jun 1986

There is no such thing as a false idea.
--Justice William Brennan, U.S. Supreme Court

If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that Government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.
--Justice William Brennan, 1989

The calculated killing of a human being by the state involves, by its very nature, an absolute denial of the executed person's humanity... The most vile murder does not, in my view, release the state from the Constitutional restraints on the destruction of human dignity... The fatal Constitutional infirmity of capital punishment is that it treats members of the human race as non-humans, as objects to be toyed with and discarded.
--Justice William Brennan Jr

I put sixteen years into that damn obscenity thing. I tried and I tried, and I waffled back and forth, and I finally gave up. If you can't define it, you can't prosecute people for it. And that's why, in the Paris Adult Theatre decision, I finally abandoned the whole effort. I reached the conclusion that every criminal-obscenity statute-and most obscenity laws are criminal-was necessarily unconstitutional, because it was impossible, from the statute, to define obscenity. Accordingly, anybody charged with violating the statute would not have known that his conduct was a violation of the law. He wouldn't know whether the material was obscene until the court told him.
--William J. Brennan, Jr., quoted in Nat Hentoff, "Profiles: The Constitutionalist," New Yorker, 12 Mar 1990

Our amended Constitution is the lodestar for our aspirations. Like every text worth reading, it is not crystalline. The phrasing is broad and the limitations of its provisions are not clearly marked. Its majestic generalities and ennobling pronouncements are both luminous and obscure. This ambiguity of course calls forth interpretation, the interaction of reader and text. The encounter with the Constitutional text has been, in many senses, my life's work.
--William J. Brennan, Jr., The Constitution of the United States: Contemporary Ratification speech, Washington, D.C. 12 Oct 1985

Destiny is no matter of chance. It is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.
--William Jennings Bryan

You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.
--William Jennings Bryan

Those who fought at Lexington and Concord were not fighting because they wanted separation of powers, or about the structure of government. They were fighting for freedom of religion, speech and press.
--Warren Burger, U.S. chief justice, 1991

The statute mandating recitation of the pledge [of allegiance] is secular because it aims to foster democracy, which is both necessary to the survival of the concept and entirely independent of religion. [...] It is clear in the 2001 [Virginia] state law that no student is forced to accept the beliefs the pledge espouses.
--Judge James C. Cacheris, 21 Feb 2003

In a way that occurred before but is rare in the United States [...] somebody came to power as a result of the illegitimate acts of a legitimate institution that had the right to put somebody in power. That is what the Supreme Court did in Bush versus Gore. It put somebody in power. The reason I emphasize that is because that is exactly what happened when Mussolini was put in by the king of Italy. The king of Italy had the right to put Mussolini in, though he had not won an election, and make him prime minister. That is what happened when Hindenburg put Hitler in. I am not suggesting for a moment that Bush is Hitler. I want to be clear on that, but it is a situation which is extremely unusual. [...] When somebody has come in that way, they sometimes have tried not to exercise much power. In this case, like Mussolini, he has exercised extraordinary power.
--Guido Calabresi of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals judge, American Constitution Society's annual convention, 19 Jun 2004

It is the responsibility of courts, and especially this court, to provide meaningful judicial review when the government invokes national security to justify unprecedented secrecy in exercising its awesome power to arrest and detain hundreds of people.

History shows that, in times of crisis and fear, executive officials are prone to overreact, especially in their treatment of minorities in their midst.
--Center for National Security Studies lawyers in a Supreme Court filing.

Parody is a form of artistic expression protected by the First Amendment. The keystone to parody is imitation. Mr. Franken is clearly mocking Fox.
--U.S. District Judge Denny Chin, 22 Aug 2003

It might well be said that one's education is not complete without a study of comparative religion or the history of religion and its relationship to the advancement of civilization. ... Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or of religion, when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education, may not be effected consistently with the First Amendment.
--Justice Tom Clark explained in Schempp

Dealing with the press is like riding a tiger - one moment you are riding it and the next moment you find yourself in the belly of the beast.
--Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., lawyer, 1998

Two hundred ten years ago, the people who drafted our Bill of Rights decided that banning books wasn't the way to handle disagreements. They thought the best thing was more speech. It is a pity that county commissioners in 2002 don't agree.

The core issue here is not whether you agree or disagree with the commissioners about gay people. It is whether you think the answer to a disagreement is to yank the words of anyone who disagrees with them out of the library.
--Matt Coles, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Lesbian and Gay Rights Projects, on the occasion of a censorship challenge to It's Perfectly Normal

The 1st Amendment embraces the individual's right to purchase and read whatever books she wishes to, without fear the government will take steps to discover which books she buys, reads, and intends to read.
--Colorado Supreme Court in a unanimous decision for Tattered Cover

Scratch just about every other FCC commissioner, and you'll find a TV critic dying to get out.
--Robert Corn-Revere, First Amendment lawyer, author, 2003

If you're going to allow people to regulate speech that you don't agree with, it can't be too long before your speech - speech that you agree with - will be limited too.
--Michael Cromett, defense counsel for a cross-burning youth
[Crommett did not feel comfortable defending the young man, but he did it.]

In a free and democratic society, a city council should not play Big Brother in trying to decide whom the residents may receive at their homes during the evening or the weekend.
--Justice Pierre J. Dalphond, Quebec Court of Appeals, 27 Aug 2003

If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one you can do the other. Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After while, your honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightment and culture to the human mind.
--Clarence S. Darrow, Speech at Scopes Trial, Dayton, Tenn., 13 Jul 1925

I have suffered from being misunderstood, but I would have suffered a hell of a lot more if I had been understood.
--Clarence Darrow, lawyer and author (1857-1938)

It is ironic that our government, which has been relentlessly critical of the messages that popular culture imparts to our youth, would seek to silence an artist who uses the medium of hip hop to preach a message of self respect and self reliance to young women and girls.
--Lisa E. Davis, attorney for Sarah Jones vs: FCC

Men may believe what they cannot prove. They may not be put to the proof of their religious doctrines or beliefs. Religious experiences which are as real as life to some may be incomprehensible to others.
--Justice William O. Douglas, United States v. Ballard, 1944

As the years pass, the power of government becomes more and more pervasive. It is a power to suffocate both people and causes. Those in power, whatever their politics, want only to perpetuate it. Now that the fences of the law and the tradition that protected the press are broken down, the people are the victims. The First Amendment, as I read it, was designed precisely to prevent that tragedy.
--Justice William O. Douglas

The press has a preferred position in our constitutional scheme, not to enable it to make money, not to set newsmen apart as a favored class, but to bring fulfillment to the public's right to know.
--Justice William O. Douglas

It is our attitude toward free thought and free expression that will determine our fate. There must be no limit on the range of temperate discussion, no limits on thought. No subject must be taboo. No censor must preside at our assemblies.
--William O. Douglas, U.S. Supreme Court justice, 1952

I suppose that a nation bent on turning out robots might insist that every male have a crew cut and every female wear pigtails. But the ideas of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," expressed in the Declaration of Independence, later found specific definition in the Constitution itself, including of course freedom of expression and a wide zone of privacy.
--William O. Douglas, US Supreme Court Justice, 1968

My faith is that the only soul a man must save is his own.
--William O. Douglas, US Supreme Court Justice (1898-1980)

Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us?
--William O. Douglas, US Supreme Court Justice (1898-1980)

Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.
--William O. Douglas, US Supreme Court Justice (1898-1980)

But our society -- unlike most in the world -- presupposes that freedom and liberty are in a frame of reference that makes the individual, not government, the keeper of his tastes, beliefs, and ideas; that is the philosophy of the First Amendment; and it is this article of faith that sets us apart from most nations in the world.
--William O. Douglas, US Supreme Court Justice (1898-1980), dissenting, Paris Adult Theatre I v. Slaton

As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air, however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.
--William O. Douglas, US Supreme Court Justice (1898-1980)

Freedom of movement is the very essence of our free society -- once the right to travel is curtailed, all other rights suffer.
--William O. Douglas (1898-1980), former Supreme Court Justice

These unwritten amenities have been in part responsible for giving our people the feeling of independence and self-confidence, the feeling of creativity. These amenities have dignified the right of dissent and have honored the right to be nonconformists and the right to defy submissiveness. They have encouraged lives of high spirits rather than hushed, suffocating silence.
--William O. Douglas, US Supreme Court Justice (1898-1980), Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville (1972)

Where suspicion fills the air and holds scholars in line for fear of their jobs, there can be no exercise of the free intellect. . . . A problem can no longer be pursued with impunity to its edges. Fear stalks the classroom. The teacher is no longer a stimulant to adventurous thinking; she becomes instead a pipe line for safe and sound information. A deadening dogma takes the place of free inquiry. Instruction tends to become sterile; pursuit of knowledge is discouraged; discussion often leaves off where it should begin.
--William O. Douglas, US Supreme Court Justice (1898-1980), Adler v. Board of Education, 1951

Once the government can demand of a publisher the names of the purchasers of his publication, the free press as we know it disappears.

Then the spectre of a government agent will look over the shoulder of everyone who reads. ... Fear of criticism goes with every person into the bookstall. The subtle, imponderable pressures of the orthodox lay hold. Some will fear to read what is unpopular, what the powers-that-be dislike. ... fear will take the place of freedom in the libraries, book stores, and homes in the land.
--William O. Douglas, US Supreme Court Justice (1898-1980)

Fear of ideas makes us impotent and ineffective.
--William O. Douglas, US Supreme Court Justice (1898-1980)

The history of liberty is the history of due process
--William O. Douglas, US Supreme Court Justice (1898-1980)

Free movement by the citizen is, of course, as dangerous to a tyrant as free expression of ideas or the right of assembly, and it is therefore controlled in most countries in the interests of security. That is why riding boxcars carries extreme penalties in Communist lands. That is why the ticketing of people and the use of identification papers are routine matters under totalitarian regimes, yet abhorrent in the United States.
--William O. Douglas, US Supreme Court Justice (1898-1980)

War may be the occasion for serious curtailment of liberty. Absent war, I see no way to keep a citizen from traveling within or without the country unless there is power to detain him. And no authority to detain exists except under extreme conditions, e.g., unless he has been convicted of a crime or unless there is probable cause for issuing a warrant of arrest by standards of the Fourth Amendment. This freedom of movement is the very essence of our free society, setting us apart. Like the right of assembly and the right of association, it often makes all other rights meaningful -- knowing, studying, arguing, exploring, conversing, observing and even thinking. Once the right to travel is curtailed, all other rights suffer, just as when curfew or home detention is placed on a person.
--William O. Douglas, US Supreme Court Justice (1898-1980)

. . . a function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it presses for acceptance of an idea.
--U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Douglas, Terminiello v. City of Chicago, May, 1949

We must protect the freedoms of even those who hate us, and that we may find objectionable. If we fail in this task, we become victims of the precedents we create.
--Judge Robert Doumar

The Pico case is significant because it resisted the oversimplified claim advanced by the school board that because the school board buys the books, they have the authority to determine what books are on the library shelves without First Amendment concerns. From a principled First Amendment understanding, book acquisitions should be treated the same as book removals.
--Arthur Eisenberg of the New York Civil Liberties Union, co-counsel for the students, Island Trees v. Pico

Political freedom cannot exist in any land where religion controls the state, and religious freedom cannot exist in any land where the state controls religion.
--Samuel James Ervin Jr., lawyer, judge, and senator (1896-1985)

Putting free speech behind bars simply because it concerns prisoners sets a dangerous precedent. The court's decision makes clear that Arizona may not jail the Internet.
--David Fathi, Arizona ACLU attorney, about an attempt to forbid convicts from accessing the internet

When it's convenience versus the First Amendment, convenience loses every time.
--U.S. District Judge Gary Feess. 19 Jul 2000

Undifferentiated fear or apprehension of disturbance is not enough to overcome the right to freedom of expression. Any departure from absolute regimentation may cause trouble. Any variation for the majority's opinion may inspire fear. . . . But our Constitution says we must take this risk.
--Justice Abe Fortas, U.S. Supreme Court, 1969

Any word spoken, in class, in the lunchroom, or on the campus, that deviates from the views of another person may start an argument or cause a disturbance. But our Constitution says that we must take this risk; and our history says that it is this sort of hazardous freedom - this kind of openness - that is the basis of our national strength and of the independence and vigor of Americans who grow up and live in this relatively permissive, often disputatious society.
--Justice Abe Fortas, U.S. Supreme Court, author of the majority opinion, Tinker v: Des Moines, 1969

The State's undoubted right to prescribe the curriculum for its public schools does not carry with it the right to prohibit, on pain of criminal penalty, the teaching of a scientific theory or doctrine where that prohibition is based upon reasons that violate the First Amendment,
--Justice Abe Fortas, 12 Nov 1968

To vest a few fallible men -- prosecutors, judges, jurors -- with vast powers of literary or artistic censorship, to convert them into what J.S. Mill called the "moral police" is to make them despotic arbiters of literary products... If one day they ban mediocre books as obscene, another day they may do otherwise to a work of a genius. Originality, not too plentiful, should be cherished, not stifled. An author's imagination may be cramped if he must write with an eye on prosecutors or juries...
--Judge Jerome Frank, Second Circuit of Appeals, 1956

Without a free press there can be no free society. Without a lively sense of responsibility a free press may readily become a powerful instrument of injustice.
--Felix Frankfurter, U.S. Supreme Court justice, 1946

An act compelling profession of allegiance to a religion, no matter how subtly or tenuously promoted, is bad.
--Felix Frankfurter, U.S. Supreme Court justice, 1943

[The law cannot] reduce the adult population ... to reading only what is fit for children.
--Justice Felix Frankfurter, in Butler v. Michigan, 1957

The State insists that, by thus quarantining the general reading public against books not too rugged for grown men and women in order to shield juvenile innocence, it is exercising its power to promote the general welfare. Surely, this is to burn the house to roast the pig.
--Justice Felix Frankfurter, in Butler v. Michigan, 1957

The law is what it is - a majestic edifice, sheltering all of us, each stone of which rests on another.
--John Gallsworthy

Human rights issues are not Republican or Democratic issues.
--John Gibbons, former U.S. federal judge, Dec 2004

I don't know any organized bar group that has taken the position that the government is right. I think most lawyers probably think the government has gone crazy.
--John Gibbons, former U.S. federal judge, Dec 2004

The clear lesson is that the government, in its understandable and laudable resolve to protect our security, cannot be relied on to protect our basic rights and liberties.
--Lawrence Goldman, president, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, responding to the Justice Department inspector general's report on the post-9-11 mass imprisonment of immigrants with roots in this country

A profession that we are a nation 'under God' is identical, for Establishment Clause purposes, to a profession that we are a nation 'under Jesus,' a nation 'under Vishnu,' a nation 'under Zeus,' or a nation 'under no God,' because none of these professions can be neutral with respect to religion.
--Judge Alfred T. Goodwin, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, 2002, ELK GROVE UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT v. NEWDOW

When historians write the story of civil liberties in the 20th century, they will say that the Clinton administration adopted an agenda that has everything to do with weakening civil rights and nothing to do with combating terrorism.
--Ira Glasser, ACLU chief, about the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996

A cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous press must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know.
--Murray Gurfein, U.S. district judge, 1971

Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.
--Judge Learned Hand, speech delivered on "I Am an American Day", New York City, 21 May 1944

I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much on constitutions, upon laws, and upon courts. These are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it. No constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.
--Judge Learned Hand, (1872-1961)

Words are chameleons, which reflect the colour of their environment.
--Judge Learned Hand, (1872-1961)

In the end it is worse to suppress dissent than to run the risk of heresy.
--Judge Learned Hand, (1872-1961), 1958

There is no surer way to misread any document than to read it literally.
--Judge Learned Hand, (1872-1961)

One man's vulgarity is another man's lyric.
--Justice Marshall Harlan, U.S. Supreme Court, 1971
[Short form of the quotation below.]

For while the particular four-letter word being litigated here is perhaps more distasteful than most others of its genre, it is nevertheless often true that one man's vulgarity is another's lyric. Indeed, we think it is largely because governmental officials cannot make principled distinctions in this area that the Constitution leaves manners of taste and style so largely to the individual.
--U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Harlan; Cohen vs. California, 1971

Surely the state has no right to cleanse public debate to the point where it is grammatically palatable to the most squeamish among us.
--John M. Harlan II, U.S. Supreme Court justice, 1971

When we strip teachers of their professional judgment, we forfeit the educational vitality we prize. When we quell controversy for the sake of congeniality, we deprive democracy of its mentors.
--Justice Gregory Hobbs Jr., Colorado Supreme Court, 2002

The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.
--Oliver Wendell Holmes, Abrams vs. U.S.

If 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

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body.
--Oliver W. Holmes Jr, US Supreme Court Justice (1841-1935)

There's nothing that keeps its youth, So far as I know, but a tree and truth.
--Oliver W. Holmes Jr, US Supreme Court Justice (1841-1935)

A 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 W. Holmes Jr, US Supreme Court Justice (1841-1935)

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtaxed.
--Oliver W. Holmes Jr, US Supreme Court Justice (1841-1935)

Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife.
--Oliver W. Holmes Jr, US Supreme Court Justice (1841-1935)

We have shared the incommunicable experience of war. We felt, we still feel, the passion of life to it's top. In our youths, our hearts were touched with fire.
--Oliver W. Holmes Jr, US Supreme Court Justice (1841-1935)

I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.
--Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, US Supreme Court Justice

. . . the marketplace of ideas . . .
--Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, US Supreme Court Justice, Nov 1919

A mind, once expanded by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.
--Oliver Wendell Holmes (Jr.?)

Persecution for the expression of opinions seems to me perfectly logical. If you have no doubt of your premises or your power and want a certain result with all your heart you naturally express your wishes in law and sweep away all opposition. [. . . .] But 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. [. . . .] I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an imm ediate check is required to save the country.
--Oliver Wendell Holmes, Abrams v. United States, (1919) (Holmes J. dissenting)

Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.
--Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., US Supreme Court Justice (1841-1935)

If 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.
--U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., 1929

The authors of the First Amendment knew that novel and unconventional ideas might disturb the complacent, but they chose to encourage a freedom which they believed essential if a vigorous enlightenment was ever to triumph over slothful ignorance. . . . The best method of censorship is by the people as self-guardians of public opinion and not by the government.
--San Francisco Municipal Judge Clayton W. Horn, circa 1965, ruling in favour of Howl in an obscenity case

Would there be any freedom of the press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid and innocuous euphemism? An author should be real in treating his subject and be allowed to express his thoughts and ideas in his own words.
--San Francisco Municipal Judge Clayton W. Horn, circa 1965, ruling in favour of Howl in an obscenity case

Last week, CBS rejected issue-oriented ads by advocacy organizations such as MoveOn.org while allowing White House issue-oriented ads for its upcoming Super Bowl broadcast. Like all broadcasters, CBS enjoys strong First Amendment rights -- rights the ACLU has vigorously defended -- but as a powerful television network it has a special role in promoting diverse opinions.

Broadcast companies such as CBS are licensed to operate over the public airwaves to provide content and support the free flow of ideas that is necessary in a dynamic democracy. As media consolidation occurs, corporations have greater responsibility to ensure this forum remains diverse. If political pressure can be used to block out certain voices in this public forum, as some have alleged in this case, we all lose out.
--Matt Howes, National Internet Organizer, ACLU, 29 Jan 2004

Spurred by the recent Massachusetts State Supreme Court decision against discrimination, the Bush Administration and some members of the radical religious right are aggressively campaigning to amend the U.S. Constitution to deny the right to marry to same-sex couples in committed relationships. Just today, the Bush Administration signaled that the President will endorse this mean-spirited measure.

[...]

The radical religious right wants to write intolerance into the U.S. Constitution and forbid equality to these citizens. As a nation we have periodically struggled with the question of marriage -- the last law prohibiting people from different races from marrying was overturned only 35 years ago -- but we have never taken the step of amending the Constitution to define marriage. Revising the Constitution to incorporate discrimination is wrong and should be rejected.
--Matt Howes, National Internet Organizer, ACLU, 11 Feb 2004

The fact that the liberty of the press may be abused by miscreant purveyors of scandal does not make any the less necessary the immunity of the press from previous restraint in dealing with official misconduct.
--Charles Evans Hughes, U.S. chief justice, 1931

A man has to live with himself, and he should see to it that he always has good company.
--Charles Evans Hughes, jurist (1862-1948)

Whoever imagines himself a favorite with God holds others in contempt.
--Robert Green Ingersoll, lawyer and orator (1833-1899)

Courage without conscience is a wild beast.
--Robert Green Ingersoll, lawyer and orator (1833-1899)

The true civilization is where every man gives to every other every right that he claims for himself.
--Robert Green Ingersoll, lawyer and orator (1833-1899)

If 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.
--Justice Robert Jackson, U.S. Supreme Court, West Virginia v. Barnette, 1943

[the Court must ensure] scrupulous protection of constitutional freedoms of the individual, if we are not to strangle the free mind at its source and teach youth to discount important principles of our government as mere platitudes.
--Justice Robert Jackson, U.S. Supreme Court, West Virginia v. Barnette, 1943

In our country are evangelists and zealots of many different political, economic and religious persuasions whose fanatical conviction is that all thought is divinely classified into two kinds -- that which is their own and that which is false and dangerous.
--Justice Robert Jackson

To sustain the compulsory flag salute we are required to say that a Bill of Rights, which guards the individual's right to speak his own mind, left it open to public authorities to compel him to utter what is not in his mind.
--Robert Jackson, U.S. Supreme Court justice, 1943

We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it...No grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy.
--Justice Robert Jackson, U.S. Supreme Court, 08 Dec 1945,
and reprinted in Precision-Guided Coverage, by Molly Ivins, May 2003

Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.
--Robert Jackson, former U.S. Supreme Court justice, 1943

If you are determined to execute a man in any case, there is no occasion for a trial. The world yields no respect to courts that are merely organized to convict.
--Robert Jackson, the US chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, circa 1945

[F]reedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order. If 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. If there are any circums tances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.
--U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, West Virginia State Bd. of Ed. v. Barnette (1943)

No political or economic situation can justify the crime of aggression. If certain acts in violation of treaties are crimes they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.
--Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, as chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg Tribunal

Saddam is certainly exploiting the uncertainties - but theories that recognize his right to do so cannot be reconciled with a reality that is knotting his noose. Even the desperate suggestion that the trial be exported to The Hague is no solution, for that ignores why Iraq is hosting it in the first place. Its primary purpose is not to find facts or hear from victims, South African truth commission-style, but to punish guilt - and catharsis demands that audience expectations be satisfied.
--Sadakat Kadri, barrister, author of The Trial: A History from Socrates to OJ Simpson, They'd Do Better Sticking Saddam's Head on a Pole, 04 Apr 2006

To laud Saddam's trial as a humanitarian milestone is a politician's lie. Iraq's invaders opened up an inferno, including notions of justice as foreseeable as they are loathsome. The prosecution will never symbolize the rebirth of the rule of law. The hanging to come will signify nothing but sleight of hand. A more fitting tribute to the tragedy unleashed by Operation Iraqi Freedom would be Saddam's head, shot through the temple and stuck on a pole, with nary a human-rights lawyer in sight. But that's just a legal opinion.
--Sadakat Kadri, barrister, author of The Trial: A History from Socrates to OJ Simpson, They'd Do Better Sticking Saddam's Head on a Pole, 04 Apr 2006

Democracy dies behind closed doors.
--Senior Judge Damon J Keith

The First Amendment is often inconvenient. But that is beside the point. Inconvenience does not absolve the government of its obligation to tolerate speech.
--Justice Anthony Kennedy, U.S. Supreme Court, 1992

Have you been a human if you can't dream about freedom?
--Justice Anthony Kennedy, U.S. Supreme Court, 2002

The government cannot ban speech fit for adults simply because it may fall into the hands of children.
--Justice Anthony Kennedy, U.S. Supreme Court, 2002

The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought.
--Justice Anthony Kennedy, U.S. Supreme Court, 16 Apr 2002, Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition

The State cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime.
--Justice Anthony Kennedy, U.S. Supreme Court in striking down a Texas anti-homosexual law, Jul 2003

[The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act] makes it a felony for an environmental group to broadcast an ad, within sixty days of an election, exhorting the public to protest a Congressman's impending vote to permit logging in national forests.
--Justice Anthony Kennedy, dissenting, McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, 10 Dec. 2003

[C]ontent-based prohibitions, enforced by severe criminal penalties, have the constant potential to be a repressive force in the lives and thoughts of a free people. To guard against that threat the Constitution demands that content-based restrictions on speech be presumed invalid and that the Government bear the burden of showing their constitutionality.
--Justice Anthony Kennedy, U.S. Supreme Court, Ashcroft v: ACLU, 27 Jun 2004

[Filters allow for] selective restrictions on speech at the receiving end, not universal restrictions at the source. Under a filtering regime, adults without children may gain access to speech they have a right to see without having to identify themselves or provide their credit card information. Above all, promoting the use of filters does not condemn as criminal any category of speech, and so the potential chilling effect is eliminated, or at least much diminished."
--Justice Anthony Kennedy, U.S. Supreme Court, Ashcroft v: ACLU, 27 Jun 2004

After years spent trying to deal with the effects of COINTELPRO, my rage at the FBI's almost unimaginable evil remains undiminished because I believe that it succeeded in many of its horrifying goals, given the deaths of Martin King, Malcolm X, and other sixties leaders.

Since the FBI uses taxpayer dollars to fund its extreme and ridiculous investigations of anyone who expresses dissenting opinions, even resorting to crime -- including theft, encouragement to murder, subornation of perjury, and manipulation of the judicial process -- to achieve its ends, I have always advocated its disbanding.
--William M. Kunstler, civil rights attorney

The act of burning a cross may mean that a person is engaging in constitutionally proscribable intimidation.

But that same act may mean only that the person is engaged in core political speech.
--Justice Donald W. Lemons, 05 Mar 2004, ruling on Elliott v. Virginia and O'Mara v. Virginia

Efficiency is a multi-edged sword; it can cut many ways.
--Judge Victor Marrero, Doe and ACLU v: Ashcroft et al, 29 Sep 2004

History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure.
--Thurgood Marshall, US Supreme Court Justice (1908-1993)

Above all else, the First Amendment means that government has no power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter, or its content.
--Thurgood Marshall, U.S. Supreme Court justice, 1972

It is now well established that the Constitution protects the right to receive information and ideas. [...] This right to receive information and ideas, regardless of their social worth, [...] is fundamental to our free society.
--Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993), Supreme Court Justice, Stanley v. Georgia, 1969

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. Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds.
--Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993), Supreme Court Justice, Stanley v. Georgia, 1969

Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds.
--Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993), Supreme Court Justice, 1969

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 (1908-1993), Supreme Court Justice

When you slithered out of your hole that day and spewed your venom all over this defenseless girl, you made this court's Top Ten list of the lowest scum this county has to offer. In a way, the best sentence this court could give would be no sentence at all, because if you left this courtroom, I don't think you would be alive ten minutes. You are nothing but a weed among wheat.

And when we have a weed, it's my job to eradicate it, because if I don't you will choke the wheat. Therefore, I'm going to take you off the streets for as long as I can.

[...] (Judge McKay handed down sentences.)

You won't be eligible for parole until you're ninety two. That leaves only one more count, aggravated robbery. . . . You stole this little girl's bra as a souvenir, probably to brag about it to your friends.

Well I'm going to give you a souvenir of Trumbull County justice. And that is, a maximum sentence of ten to twenty five on the aggravated robbery for stealing that bra.

And I hope that in your last twenty five years in prison you remember that souvenir.

Get this scum out of here.
--U.S. Judge W. Wyatt McKay, sentencing a criminal for the kidnapping and repeated rape of a twelve year old girl, and robbery.

In a constitutional democracy, governments must act accountably and in conformity with the Constitution and the rights and liberties it guarantees. ... Security concerns cannot be used to excuse procedures that do not conform to fundamental justice.
--Chief Justice McLachlin, Supreme Court of Canada, Charkaoui v. Canada, 23 Feb 2007

The same liberties that ensure a free society make the innocent vulnerable to those who prevent rights and privileges and commit senseless and cruel acts. Those precious liberties include free speech, freedom to assemble, freedom of liberties, access to public places, the right to bear arms and freedom from constant surveillance. We are not willing to sacrifice these rights because of the acts of maniacs.
--Harriet Miers, in the wake of a shooting rampage at a Fort Worth courthouse

Lawyers are about seeking the truth, preserving a system to achieve fairness and justice, and protecting the freedom of individuals against the tyranny of the majority view.
--Harriet Miers in the Texas Bar Journal

If this Court is to err in evaluating claims that freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion have been invaded, far better that it err in being overprotective of these precious rights.
--Frank Murphy, former U.S. Supreme Court justice, 1942

Now, without you knowing it, the Justice Department can learn where you traveled, what you spent, what you ate, what you paid to finance your car and your house, what you confided to your lawyer and insurance and real estate agents, and what periodicals you read without having to demonstrate any evidence or even suspicion of criminal activity on your part.
--Judge Napolitano
[Commenting on National Security Letters sent out by the U.S. government without requirement of a judge's approval, as part of the Intelligence Authorization Act for fiscal 2004 that was signed into law by the president on 13 Dec 2003.]

A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist.
--Louis Nizer, lawyer (1902-1994)

The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors, but "[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." To this end, copyright assures authors the right to their original expression, but encourages others to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work. This result is neither unfair nor unfortunate. It is the means by which copyright advances the progress of science and art.
--Sandra Day O'Connor, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 1991

The prima facie evidence provision in this case ignores all of the contextual factors that are necessary to decide whether a particular cross burning is intended to intimidate. The First Amendment does not permit such a shortcut.
--Sandra Day O'Connor, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, writing for the majority in Virginia v. Black, 07 Apr 2003

The hallmark of the protection of free speech is to allow free trade in ideas -- even ideas that the overwhelming majority of people find distasteful or discomforting.
--Sandra Day O'Connor U.S. Supreme Court justice, 2003

[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, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Hamdi v: Rumsfeld, 29 Jun 2004

I am against judicial reforms driven by nakedly partisan reasoning. The courts do have the power to make presidents, the Congress, or governors really, really angry. But if we don't make them mad some of the time, we probably aren't doing our jobs as judges. . . .
--Sandra Day O'Connor, retired Supreme Court Justice, Mar 2006

We must be ever-vigilant against those who would strong-arm the Judiciary into adopting their preferred policies.
--Sandra Day O'Connor, retired Supreme Court Justice, Mar 2006

No robust democracy insulates its citizens from views that they might find novel or even inflammatory.
--Sandra Day O'Connor, former U.S. Supreme Court justice, 2004

MacKinnon's treatment of the central issue of pornography as she herself poses it -- the harm that pornography does to women -- is shockingly causal. Much of her evidence is anecdotal, and in a nation of 260 Million people, anecdotes are a weak form of evidence.
--Judge Richard Posner, Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals

I do not know what has caused MacKinnon to become, and, more surprisingly, to remain, so obsessed with pornography, and so zealous for censorship. But let us not sacrifice our civil liberties on the altar of her obsession.
--Judge Richard Posner, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit,
reprinted in Defending Pornography, pg 141

Now that eighteen-year-olds have the right to vote, it is obvious that they must be allowed the freedom to form their political views on the basis of uncensored speech before they turn eighteen, so that their minds are not a blank when they first exercise the franchise. And since an eighteen-year-old’s right to vote is a right personal to him rather than a right to be exercised on his behalf by his parents, the right of parents to enlist the aid of the state to shield their children from ideas of which the parents disapprove cannot be plenary either. People are unlikely to become well-functioning, independent-minded adults and responsible citizens if they are raised in an intellectual bubble.
--Seventh District Judge Richard Posner, American Amusement Machine Association, et al., Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. Teri Kendrick, et al., Defendants-Appellees (2001)

It is the censor's business to make a judgment about the propriety of the content or message of the proposed expressive activity. The regulation here does not authorize any judgment about the content of any speeches." [...] "A park is a limited space, and to allow unregulated access to all comers could easily reduce rather than enlarge the park's utility as a forum for speech. Just imagine two rallies held at the same time in the same park area using public-address systems that drowned out each other's speakers.
--Judge Richard Posner, Thomas v. Chicago Park District, Sep. 2000

To shield children right up to the age of 18 from exposure to violent descriptions and images would not only be quixotic, but deforming; it would leave them unequipped to cope with the world as we know it.
--Judge Richard Posner, 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, 23 Mar 2003

Now that eighteen-year-olds have the right to vote, it is obvious that they must be allowed the freedom to form their political views on the basis of uncensored speech before they turn eighteen. People are unlikely to become well-functioning, independent-minded adults and responsible citizens if they are raised in an intellectual bubble.
--Judge Richard Posner, 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, 23 Mar 2003
(Also cited as being said in 2000. --MN)

Violent video games played in public places are a tiny fraction of the media violence to which modern American children are exposed. Tiny -- and judging from the record of this case not very violent compared to what is available to children on television and in movie theaters today.
--Judge Richard Posner, 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, 23 Mar 2003

Public debate must not only be unfettered; it must also be informed.
--Lewis Powell, U.S. Supreme Court justice, 1978

A State or municipality may protect individual privacy by enacting reasonable time, place, and manner regulations applicable to all speech irrespective of content. But when the government, acting as censor, undertakes selectively to shield the public from some kinds of speech on the ground that they are more offensive than others, the First Amendment strictly limits its power.
--Lewis Powell, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Erznoznik v. City of Jacksonville, 1975

"For God's sake, don't publish any more obscene literature."

"How am I to know when it's obscene?"

"I'm sure I don't know. But don't do it!"
--Lawyer John Quinn to Margaret Anderson, after she published an excerpt from James Joyce's Ulysses in 1920

If what we read today can result in a subpoena or a search warrant tomorrow, fear replaces freedom. We presented three witnesses who said there would, in fact, be a chilling effect if the Tattered Cover was forced to turn over the information.
--Dan Recht, lawyer for the Tattered Cover bookstore

Indeed, perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection.
--Judge Lowell A. Reed, Jr, American Civil Liberties Union, et al. v. Janet Reno

Simply because the government finds speech offensive does not give them the right to repress it.
--Justice William H. Rehnquist

Technology now permits millions of important and confidential conversations to occur through a vast system of electronic networks. These advances, however, raise significant privacy concerns. We are placed in the uncomfortable position of not knowing who might have access to our personal and business e-mails, our medical and financial records, or our cordless and cellular telephone conversations.
--William H. Rehnquist, US Supreme Court Chief Justice, 2001

Where the First Amendment is implicated, the tie goes to the speaker, not the censor.
--Chief Justice John Roberts, U.S. Supreme Court, 25 Jun 2007, FEC v. Wisconsin Right to Life
[Spouting a sententious hypocrisy in which he does not believe, given that it directly contradicts his reasoning and decision in Morse v: Frederick; moreover, this was the only case of the term in which the First Amendment claimant was the clear winner over a government adversary. --MN]

Wherever the title of streets and parks may rest, they have immemorially been held in trust for the use of the public and, time out of mind, have been used for purposes of assembly, communicating thoughts between citizens, and discussing public questions.
--Owen J. Roberts, U.S. Supreme Court justice, 1939

[The law] cuts to the heart of what the First Amendment is meant to protect: the right to criticize the government.
--Justice Antonin Scalia, dissenting, McConnell v. Federal Election Commission (McCain-Feingold), 10 Dec. 2003

Many think it is not only inevitable but entirely proper that liberty give way to security in times of national crisis. . . . Whatever the general merits of the view that war silences law or modulates its voice, that view has no place in the interpretation and application of a Constitution designed precisely to confront war and, in a manner that accords with democratic principles, to accommodate it.
--Justice Antonin Scalia, U.S. Supreme Court, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 28 Jun 2004

The line between protected pornography and unprotected obscenity lies between appealing to a good healthy interest in sex and appealing to a depraved interest, whatever that means.
--Antonin Scalia, U.S. Supreme Court justice, 2005

The Sedition Act of 1798 had nothing to do with sedition, and the Patriot Act of 2001 had nothing to do with patriotism.
--John Seigenthaler, First Amendment Center, 2003

The First Amendment should not be used as a shield for pornographers at the expense of our children. It is clear that public libraries have a compelling interest to protect the physical and psychological well-being of children. The law does not require every computer in the library to be equipped with the filtering software. The law strikes a delicate balance between protecting children and permitting adults to use a filter-free Internet without trampling on the First Amendment. The law is a reasonable and constitutional way to protect children from online pornography in public libraries.
--Jay Sekulow, chief counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice
[Except that Sekulow and his ilk don't want to protect children so much as they want to control what all people are thinking, saying, seeing, and doing. --MN]

Now, far be it from me to criticize partial nudity and cartoonish violence. Hell, if there were a Partial Nudity and Cartoonish Violence network (PNCV?), I'd be all over it. MTV has every right to show squished testicles and blurred ta-tas -- and I reject any lawmaker's attempt to the censor the network.
--Evan Serpick, Entertainment Weekly, 07 Nov 2002, printed at CNN.com

The administration has treated the rule of law as an inconvenience in the war against terrorism. In response, the Supreme Court has sent a powerful message that the end does not justify the means, and that it will not sit on the sidelines while the rule of law is ignored.
--Steven R. Shapiro, the ACLU’s national legal director, 28 Jun 2004

A major purpose of the First Amendment ... is to protect the romantics - those who would break out of classical forms: the dissenters, the unorthodox, the outcasts.
--Steven H. Shiffrin, author, law professor, 1990

Under the First Amendment, clearly, there can be no "approved view of women" and of "how the sexes may relate to each other." (The free speech issue would be obvious to academics if the question were an approved view of men, women or Americanism.) There can be no imposition of regimes aimed at changing the attitudes of free citizens by censorship and coercion, rather than by appeal to reason and decency. Freedom of speech, like its close ally freedom of conscience, in America are essential legal and moral values, and their protection begins with the recognition that we are a nation of free individuals who may define for ourselves the deepest part of our being. Disguising censorship as a "civil rights" mechanism will not succeed in gutting the First Amendment.
--Harvey A. Silverglate, 26 Jan 1999, Speech Codes and College/University Campuses

The point is, or should be, simple. Pure speech, even if obnoxious to many, if it does not fall into any of the categories of unprotected speech, is fully protected by the First Amendment. Harassment, in its true sense, may be legislated against, but on the basis of total content-neutrality and only with respect to time, place and manner. (The same may be said of threats to physical safety, which are not constitutionally protected.)
--Harvey A. Silverglate, 26 Jan 1999, Speech Codes and College/University Campuses

If a professor or student says something extremely unpleasant to any other person - whether a member of a minority group or not - that speaker is within his or her constitutional rights. If, on the other hand, the speaker delivers a message, whether one of love or of hate, to another at a time, in a place, or in a manner that constitutes harassment within the ancient common law and widely understood definition of that term, such utterance may be punished, and it does not take a special campus speech code to do it, for the civil and criminal laws governing the entire society apply. All of the arguments concerning the relationship between Title VII and Title IX sexual harassment law are entirely beside the point and are rendered irrelevant by the Constitution. To repeat the central point: It is fine for colleges and universities to have anti-harassment codes, as long as pure speech is not counted within the definition of harassment
--Harvey A. Silverglate, 26 Jan 1999, Speech Codes and College/University Campuses

The fact that codes banning speech are unconstitutional does not mean that a university is powerless in seeking to promote tolerance, understanding, civility, and mutual respect among members of its community. However, the means chosen must be educational, not coercive. Teaching critical thinking, as well as the lessons of history, presumably will bring perceptive students closer to the view expressed by Justice Robert Jackson, writing for a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court in a landmark case declaring that a Jehovah's Witness child may not be forced to recite the pledge of allegiance to the flag in violation of his religious conscience.
--Harvey A. Silverglate, 26 Jan 1999, Speech Codes and College/University Campuses

It may be useful to note our belief that most citizens of the United States willingly recite the Pledge of Allegiance and proudly sing the national anthem. But the rights embodied in the in the Constitution, particularly the First Amendment, protect the minority -- those persons who march to their own drummers.

It is they who need the protection afforded by the Constitution and it is the responsibility of federal judges to ensure that protection.
--Judge Dolores K. Sloviter, The Circle School v. Pappert, 19 Aug 2004

First, one must ask whether it is not preferable to permit the expression and allow the criminal or civil law to deal with the individual who publishes obscene, defamatory or hateful messages rather than prevent speech before it can be expressed. Otherwise, individuals may be putting themselves in the positions of courts to determine what is obscene and what is acceptable.
--Justice John Sopinka, Supreme Court of Canada, 26 Nov 1994, in a speech given at the University of Waterloo

We accept the risk that words and ideas have wings we cannot clip and which carry them we know not where.
--Joseph T. Sneed, U.S. appeals court judge, 1991

It is offensive - not only to the values protected by the First Amendment, but to the very notion of a free society - that in the context of everyday public discourse a citizen must first inform the government of her desire to speak to her neighbors and then obtain a permit to do so.
--Justice John Paul Stevens; in the majority opinion against the Stratton, Ohio, soliciting permit ordinance

"I am the Lord thy God" [is] rather hard to square with the proposition that the monument expresses no particular religious preference.
--Justice Stevens, U.S. Supreme Court, about a case over ten commandments monuments on government property

If the historic landmark on a hill in Boerne happened to be a museum or an art gallery owned by an atheist, it would not be eligible for an exemption from the city ordinance that forbid demolition of the structure. Because the landmark is owned by the Catholic Church, it is claimed that RFRA gives its owner a federal statutory entitlement to an exemption from a generally applicable, neutral civil law. Whether the Church would actually prevail under the statute or not, the statute has provided the Church with a legal weapon that no atheist or agnostic can obtain. This government preference for religion, as opposed to irreligion, is forbidden by the First Amendment...
--Justice John Paul Stevens, U.S. Supreme Court, Boerne v. Flores, Jun 1993

By failing to protect the public interest in free access to the products of inventive and artistic genius - indeed, by virtually ignoring the central purpose of the Copyright/Patent Clause - the Court has quitclaimed to Congress its principal responsibility in this area of the law.
--Justice John Paul Stevens, U.S. Supreme Court, 2003

It is possible to read the Court's opinion in Roth v. United States and Alberts v. California, 354 U.S. 476, in a variety of ways. In saying this, I imply no criticism of the Court, which in those cases was faced with the task of trying to define what may be indefinable. I have reached the conclusion, which I think is confirmed at least by negative implication in the Court's decisions since Roth and Alberts, that under the First and Fourteenth Amendments criminal laws in this area are constitutionally limited to hard-core pornography. I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.
--Justice Potter Stewart, the full source for the "I'll know it when I see it" quotation

Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime . . . .
--Justice Potter Stewart, U.S. Supreme Court, dissenting Ginzberg v. United States (1966)

Enlightened choice by an informed citizenry is the basic ideal upon which an open society is premised, and a free press is thus indispensable to a free society.
--Justice Potter Stewart, U.S. Supreme Court, 1972

When everything is classified, then nothing is classified, and the system becomes one to be disregarded by the cynical or the careless, and to be manipulated by those intent on self-protection or self-promotion.
--Potter Stewart, former U.S. Supreme Court justice, 1971

I have reached the conclusion . . . that under the First and Fourteenth Amendments criminal laws in this area [obscenity] are constitutionally limited to hard-core pornography. I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know when I see it; and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.
--Potter Stewart, Jacobellis v. Ohio, 1964, concurring

All restraints upon man's natural liberty, not necessary for the simple maintenance of justice, are of the nature of slavery, and differ from each other only in degree.
--Lysander Spooner, lawyer (1808-1887)

One of the great concerns of our times is that our young people, disillusioned by our political processes, are disengaging from political participation. It is most important that our young become convinced that our Constitution is a living reality, not parchment preserved under glass.
--Nadine Strossen, President, ACLU

Freedom of discussion is essential to enlighten public opinion in a democratic state. It cannot be curtailed without affecting the right of the people to be informed through sources independent of the government concerning matters of public interest. There must be untrammeled publication of the news. ... Democracy cannot be maintained without its foundation: Free public opinion and free discussion throughout the nation of all matters affecting the state within the limits set by the criminal code and the common law.
--Supreme Court of Canada, 1938, in striking down the Albert Press Bill,
and reprinted in Yesterday's News, pg 39

A free press stands as one of the great interpreters between the government and the people. To allow it to be fettered is to fetter ourselves.
--George Sutherland, U.S. Supreme Court justice, 1936

The term "fucking pigs" in the context in which it was used referred not to copulation of porcine animals but was rather a highly insulting epithet directed to the police officers.....Appellant's use of the vulgarism describing the filial partner in an oedipal relationship is fairly to be viewed as an epithet rather than as a phrase appealing to a shameful or morbid interest in intra-family sex....There is, after all, a strong possibility that an expert witness called in the matter before us might have testified to the occasional use of the offending profane adjective in bar association quarters or in trial judges' lounges - alas, all too often in reference to a decision of the Court of Appeal.
--Robert S. Thompson, People v. Price, 1970, dissenting

If certain bullies are likely to act violently when a student wears long hair, it is unquestionably easy for a principal to preclude the outburst by preventing the student from wearing long hair. To do so, however, is to sacrifice freedom upon the altar of order, and allow the scope of our liberty to be dictated by the inclinations of the unlawful mob.
--Judge Gerald B. Tjoflat, 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, in a free speech case, alluding to a ruling in a previous case

We cannot simply suspend or restrict civil liberties until the War on Terror is over, because the War on Terror is unlikely ever to be truly over. September 11, 2001, already a day of immeasurable tragedy, cannot be the day liberty perished in this country.
--Judge Gerald Tjoflat, for the panel, Bourgeois v. Peters, 15 Oct 2004

In the absence of some reason to believe that international terrorists would target or infiltrate this protest, there is no basis for using Sept. 11 as an excuse for searching the protesters. This case presents an especially malignant unconstitutional condition because citizens are being required to surrender a constitutional right -- freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures -- not merely to receive a discretionary benefit but to exercise two other fundamental rights -- freedom of speech and assem bly.
--Judge Gerald Tjoflat, for the panel, Bourgeois v. Peters, 15 Oct 2004

NBC would dress Tom Brokaw as a bald eagle if it would secure a better Nielsen share.
--Jonathan Turley, law professor, columnist, Los Angeles Times, 2003

It is completely and facially unethical for [Attorney General Alberto] Gonzales to head this investigation. Comey's role is fascinating since he has been repeatedly accused of being cavalier about civil liberties. The refusal of some officials to cooperate with this operation reflects unease over the alleged criminal element of the president's order.
--Jonathan Turley, professor of Constitutional law at George Washington University, 03 Jan 2006, on the topic of the leak of the illegal use of the NSA in domestic spying by the Bush administration

Any pursuit of the leaker in this case would be shooting the messenger. Federal officials are prohibited from engaging in crimes and federal employees with knowledge of such crimes have an obligation to disclose them; one can argue whether the New York Times was the best venue for this disclosure, but historically, some of the most important disclosures of federal misconduct have been made through the media. ... The bigger question remains that the president is openly stating that he ordered domestic spying by the NSA without a court order. It is illegal and unconstitutional for him to do so; it makes a mockery of federal law if it is subject to the whim of the president.
--Jonathan Turley, professor of Constitutional law at George Washington University, 03 Jan 2006, on the topic of the leak of the illegal use of the NSA in domestic spying by the Bush administration

Regulations that 'drive certain ideas or viewpoints from the marketplace' for the benefit of children risk destroying the very political system and cultural life' that they will inherit when they come of age.
--U.S. Supreme Court, ACLU v. Reno, June 1997

It is not the function of the government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.
--U.S. Supreme Court

[The] classroom is peculiarly the "marketplace of ideas." The Nation's future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to that robust exchange of ideas which discovers "truth out of a multitude of tongues, (rather) than through any kind of authoritative selection."
--U.S. Supreme Court, Keyishian v. Board of Education

In Garrison v. Louisiana, 379 U.S. 64 (1964), we held that even when a speaker or writer is motivated by hatred or ill-will, his expression was protected by the First Amendment....

Were we to hold otherwise, there can be little doubt that political cartoonists and satirists would be subjected to damages awards without any showing that their work falsely defamed its subject.... The appeal of the political cartoon or caricature is often based on exploitation of unfortunate physical traits or politically embarrassing events -- an exploitation often calculated to injure the feelings of the subject of the portrayal. The art of the cartoonist is often not reasoned or evenhanded, but slashing and one-sided....
--U.S. Supreme Court, Hustler Magazine v. Falwell

The freedom to speak one's mind is not only an aspect of individual liberty -- and thus a good unto itself -- but also is essential to the common quest for truth and the vitality of society as a whole.... The First Amendment recognized no such thing as a "false" idea. As Justice Holmes wrote, "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....
--U.S. Supreme Court, Hustler Magazine v. Falwell

The fact that society may find speech offensive is not a sufficient reason for suppressing it. Indeed, if it is the speaker's opinion that gives offense, that consequence is a reason for according it constitutional protection. For it is a central tenet of the First Amendment that the government must remain neutral in the marketplace of ideas.
--U.S. Supreme Court

It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.
--U.S. Supreme Court, Tinker v: Des Moines

While it was relatively easy to discern a connection between the threatening culture that crime comics represented, and the perceived increase in juvenile delinquency at the end of the war, the willingness to believe in such a relationship was essentially opportunistic.
--U.S. Supreme Court, Winters case ruling

Whereas, the due process and equal protection clauses of the 5th and 14th Amendments to the United States Constitution guarantee certain due process and equal rights to all residents of the United States, regardless of citizenship or immigration status . . .
--U.S. Supreme Court, in Zadvydas v. Davis, 2001

The interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society outweighs any theoretical but unproven benefit of censorship.
--U.S. Supreme Court, from the decision on the Communications Decency Act

The concept that government may restrict the speech of some elements of our society in order to enhance the relative voice of others is wholly foreign to the First Amendment.
--U.S. Supreme Court, Buckley v. Vallejo, 1976

The Ten Commandments is undeniably a sacred text in the Jewish and Christian faiths, and no legislative recitation of a supposed secular purpose can blind us to that fact.
--U.S. Supreme Court, Stone v. Graham, 1980

Punishing desecration of the flag dilutes the very freedom that makes this emblem so revered.
--U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. v. Eichman, 1990

No majority of the court has at any given time been able to agree on a standard to determine what constitutes obscene, pornographic material.
--U.S. Supreme Court, Miller v. California, 1973

There is no U.S. Supreme Court precedent for the principle that students enjoy diminished First Amendment rights when they are offcampus simply by virtue of being young. When students are engaging in expression off-campus, they wearing the hat of a young citizen, not of a student.
--Raymond Vasvari, legal director for the ACLU of Ohio,

Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding; otherwise our civilization will stagnate and die.
--Earl Warren, Chief Justice U.S. Supreme Court, Sweezy v. New Hampshire

Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile I caught hell for.
--Earl Warren, Chief Justice U.S. Supreme Court

The censor's sword pierces deeply into the heart of free expression.
--Earl Warren, Chief Justice U.S. Supreme Court, 1961

It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defence, we would sanction the subversion of one of those liberties which make the defence of our nation worthwhile.
--Earl Warren, jurist (1891-1974)

Keep cool; anger is not an argument.
--Daniel Webster 1782-1852, American statesman, lawyer, and orator

Our principle motivation in taking the cross-burning case to the Supreme Court was to get removed from the statute the assumption that all cross burning is done with intent to intimidate.

This puts the cross-burning law where it should be -- that is, if someone is going to be prosecuted for cross burning there must be evidence there was intent to intimidate someone based on their race or religion.
--Kent Willis, executive director of the ACLU in Virginia, Mar 2004

Once government abandons its neutral position toward religion and tries to somehow accommodate all religions, it creates an almost impossible situation because some religions ultimately will be left out or be discriminated against.
--Kent Willis, executive director of the ACLU of Virginia, circa 2004

Freedom of expression in a wired world has become a zero-sum game. We can no longer complacently take pride in the American system for protecting free speech because the failings of other legal systems now are eroding our own freedoms.
--Kurt Wimmer, international media lawyer, 2003

The words which are criticized as dirty [in James Joyce's Ulysses] are old Saxon words known to almost all men and, I venture, to many women, and are such words as would be naturally and habitually used, I believe, by the types of folk whose life, physical, and mental, Joyce is seeking to describe. In respect of the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of his characters, it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season spring.
--John M. Woolsey, United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, 1933

Indeed, the Government's asserted "failure" of the Internet rests on the implicit premise that too much speech occurs in that medium, and that speech there is too available to the participants.
--Restraining order June 12, 1996 on ACLU v. Reno

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