We must meet the challenge rather than wish it were not before us.
It is difficult to understand precisely what the state hopes to achieve by promoting the creation and perpetuation of a subclass of illiterates within our boundaries, surely adding to the problems and costs of unemployment, welfare and crime.
Religious conflict can be the bloodiest and cruelest conflicts that turn people into fanatics.
The genius of the Constitution rests not in any static meaning it might have had in a world that is dead and gone, but in the adaptability of its great principles to cope with current problems and current needs.
If the right to privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion.
Perhaps the bleakest fact of all is that the death penalty is imposed not only in a freakish and discriminatory manner, but also in some cases upon defendants who are actually innocent.
No longer is the female destined solely for the home and the rearing of the family and only the male for the marketplace and the world of ideas.
If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.
The framers knew that liberty is a fragile thing, and so should we.
Law cannot stand aside from the social changes around it.
The principle inherent in the clause that prohibits pointless infliction of excessive punishment when less severe punishment can adequately achieve the same purposes invalidates the punishment.
There is no such thing as a false idea.
We current justices read the Constitution in the only way that we can: as 20th-century Americans.
After each perceived security crisis ended, the United States has remorsefully realized that the abrogation of civil liberties was unnecessary.
At bottom, the battle has been waged on moral grounds. The country has debated whether a society for which the dignity of the individual is the supreme value can, without a fundamental inconsistency, follow the practice of deliberately putting one of its members to death.
It is tempting to pretend that minorities on death row share a fate in no way connected to our own, that our treatment of them sounds no echoes beyond the chambers in which they die. Such an illusion is ultimately corrosive, for the reverberations of injustice are not so easily confined.
Authoritative interpretations of the First Amendment guarantees have consistently refused to recognize an exception for any test of truth whether administered by judges, juries, or administrative officials and especially one that puts the burden of proving truth on the speaker.
The Bill of Rights never gets off the page and into the lives of most Americans.