We can afford no liberties with liberty itself.

I used to say that, as Solicitor General, I made three arguments of every case. First came the one that I planned-as I thought, logical, coherent, complete. Second was the one actually presented-interrupted, incoherent, disjointed, disappointing. The third was the utterly devastating argument that I thought of after going to bed that night.

In our country are evangelists and zealots of many different political, economic and religious persuasions whose fanatical conviction is that all thought is divinely classified into two kinds - that which is their own and that which is false and dangerous.

The price of freedom of religion or of speech or of the press is that we must put up with, and even pay for, a good deal of rubbish.

It is not the function of government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.

We are not final because we are infallible, but infallible only because we are final.

In this court the parties changed positions as nimbly as if dancing a quadrille.