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

There's a time for debate and a time for consensus. There's 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.

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

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.

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

Any time you burn a cross in Virginia, it's a crime?