Religious conflict can be the bloodiest and cruelest conflicts that turn people into fanatics.

The quest for freedom, dignity, and the rights of man will never end.

No longer is the female destined solely for the home and the rearing of the family and only the male for the marketplace and the world of ideas.

We current justices read the Constitution in the only way that we can: as 20th-century Americans.

The law is not an end in itself, nor does it provide ends. It is preeminently a means to serve what we think is right.

At bottom, the battle has been waged on moral grounds. The country has debated whether a society for which the dignity of the individual is the supreme value can, without a fundamental inconsistency, follow the practice of deliberately putting one of its members to death.

Our amended Constitution is the lodestar for our aspirations. Like every text worth reading, it is not crystalline. The phrasing is broad and the limitations of its provisions are not clearly marked. Its majestic generalities and ennobling pronouncements are both luminous and obscure. This ambiguity of course calls forth interpretation, the interaction of reader and text. The encounter with the Constitutional text has been, in many senses, my life's work.