All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them.
Wisdom too often never comes, so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.
The Court’s authority – possessed of neither the purse nor the sword -ultimately rests on substantial public confidence in its moral sanctions.
Fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalized medium of reason that’s all we have standing between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled undisciplined feeling.
It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have frequently been forged in cases involving not very nice people.
I don’t like a man to be too efficient. He’s likely to be not human enough.
It simply is not true that war never settles anything.
Old age and sickness bring out the essential characteristics of a man.
The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards.
Freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of achieving a free society.