Potter Stewart Quotes

20 quotes in 368 categories

• The right to defy an unconstitutional statute is basic in our scheme. Even when an ordinance requires a permit to make a speech, to deliver…
• Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself.
• The equal protection standard of the constitution has one clear and central meaning - it absolutely prohibits invidious [repugnant] discrimination by government...Under our Constitution, any…
• To force a lawyer on a defendant can only lead him to believe that the law contrives against him.
• I shall not attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description (of pornography), and perhaps I…
• For the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not…
• The dichotomy between personal liberties and property rights is a false one. Property does not have rights. People have rights.
• The First Amendment guarantees liberty of human expression in order to preserve in our Nation what Mr. Justice Holmes called a "free trade in ideas."…
• We dedicated ourselves to a powerful idea - organic law rather than naked power. There seems to be universal acceptance of that idea in the…
• Swift justice demands more than just swiftness.
• It must always be remembered that what the Constitution forbids is not all searches and seizures, but unreasonable searches and seizures.
• A person's mere propinquity to others independently suspected of criminal activity does not give rise to probable cause to search that person.
• Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do.
• Fairness is what justice really is.
• Abortion is inherently different from other medical procedures because no other procedure involves the purposeful termination of a potential life.
• The 4th Amendment and the personal rights it secures have a long history. At the very core stands the right of a man to retreat…
• I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material but I know it when I see it.
• In fact, a fundamental interdependence exists between the personal right to liberty and the personal right to property.
• Newspapers, television networks, and magazines have sometimes been outrageously abusive, untruthful, arrogant, and hypocritical. But it hardly follows that elimination of a strong and independent…
• Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.

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