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

Capital punishment...treats members of the human race...as objects to be toyed with and discarded.

The concept of military necessity is seductively broad, and has a dangerous plasticity. Because they invariably have the visage of overriding importance, there is always a temptation to invoke security "necessities" to justify an encroachment upon civil liberties. For that reason, the military-security argument must be approached with a healthy skepticism.

Clerks get into the damnedest wrangles--which is the way they help me.

There is no such thing as a false idea.

Consequences flow from a justice's interpretation in a direct and immediate way. A judicial decision respecting the incompatibility of Jim Crow with a constitutional guarantee of equality is not simply a contemplative exercise in defining the shape of a just society. It is an order

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