When a legislature undertakes to proscribe the exercise of a citizen's constitutional right to free speech, it acts lawlessly; and the citizen can take matters into his own hands and proceed on the basis that such a law is no law at all.

The dominant purpose of the First Amendment was to prohibit the widespread practice of government suppression of embarrassing information.

It seemed to me that I had barely reached the Court when people were trying to get me off.

A people who extend civil liberties only to preferred groups start down the path either to dictatorship of the right or the left.

These unwritten amenities have been in part responsible for giving our people the feeling of independence and self-confidence, the feeling of creativity. These amenities have dignified the right of dissent and have honored the right to be nonconformists and the right to defy submissiveness. They have encouraged lives of high spirits rather than hushed, suffocating silence.

Fear of ideas makes us impotent and ineffective.

The association promotes a way of life, not causes; a harmony in living, not political faiths; a bilateral loyalty, not commercial or social projects. Yet it is an association for as noble a purpose as any involved in any prior decisions.