We are more casual about qualifying the people we allow to act as advocates in the courtroom than we are about licensing electricians.

The notion that most people want black-robed judges, well-dressed lawyers and fine-paneled courtrooms as the setting to resolve their disputes is not correct. People with problems, like people with pains, want relief, and they want it as quickly and inexpensively as possible.

Calculated risks of abuse are taken in order to preserve higher values.

[I]n constitutional adjudication some steps, which when taken were thought to approach 'the verge,' have become the platform for yet further steps. A certain momentum develops in constitutional theory and it can be a 'downhill thrust' easily set in motion but difficult to retard or stop.

There may be some incorrigible human beings who cannot be changed except by God's own mercy to that one person.

There are many prices we pay for freedoms secured by the First Amendment; the risk of undue influence is one of them, confirming what we have long known: Freedom is hazardous, but some restraints are worse.

[No one will be able to] deter the scientific mind from probing into the unknown any more than Canute could command the tides.