For the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection. But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material but I know it when I see it.

Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do.

The dichotomy between personal liberties and property rights is a false one. Property does not have rights. People have rights.

Newspapers, television networks, and magazines have sometimes been outrageously abusive, untruthful, arrogant, and hypocritical. But it hardly follows that elimination of a strong and independent press is the way to eliminate abusiveness . . .

Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.

May the state fence in the harmless mentally ill solely to save its citizens from exposure to those whose ways are different? One might as well ask if the state, to avoid public unease, could incarcerate all who are physically unattractive or socially eccentric.