We are concerned here only with the imposition of capital punishment for the crime of murder, and when a life has been taken deliberately by the offender, we cannot say that the punishment is invariably disproportionate to the crime. It is an extreme sanction suitable to the most extreme of crimes.

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

I think that the Court's task, in this as in all areas of constitutional adjudication, is not responsibly aided by the uncritical invocation of metaphors like the ' wall of separation,' a phrase nowhere to be found in the Constitution.

The Court today holds the Congress may say that some of the poor are too poor even to go bankrupt. I cannot agree.

The right to defy an unconstitutional statute is basic in our scheme. Even when an ordinance requires a permit to make a speech, to deliver a sermon, to picket, to parade, or to assemble, it need not be honored when it's invalid on its face.

To force a lawyer on a defendant can only lead him to believe that the law contrives against him.

These death sentences are cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual.