When a law is in its nature a contract, when absolute rights have vested under that contract, a repeal of the law cannot divest those rights.

The government of the United States has been emphatically termed a government of laws, and not of men. It will certainly cease to deserve this high appellation, if the laws furnish no remedy for the violation of a vested legal right.

Have no power, by taxation or otherwise, to retard, impede, burden or in any manner control the operations of the constitutional laws enacted by Congress.

The particular phraseology of the Constitution of the United States confirms and strengthens the principle, supposed to be essential to all written constitutions, that a law repugnant to the Constitution is void; and that courts, as well as other departments, are bound by that instrument.

The most lively fancy aided by the strongest description cannot equal the reality of the opera.

The power to tax involves the power to destroy;...the power to destroy may defeat and render useless the power to create.

The peculiar circumstances of the moment may render a measure more or less wise, but cannot render it more or less constitutional.