Potter Stewart Quotes

Abortion is inherently different from other medical procedures because no other procedure involves the purposeful termination of a potential life.

Swift justice demands more than just swiftness.

For me this is not something that can be swept under the rug and forgotten in the interest of forced Sunday togetherness.

A person's mere propinquity to others independently suspected of criminal activity does not give rise to probable cause to search that person.

These death sentences are cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual.

We are concerned here only with the imposition of capital punishment for the crime of murder, and when a life has been taken deliberately by the offender, we cannot say that the punishment is invariably disproportionate to the crime. It is an extreme sanction suitable to the most extreme of crimes.

In fact, a fundamental interdependence exists between the personal right to liberty and the personal right to property.

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 into his own home and there be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion.

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." To that end, the Constitution protects more than just a man's freedom to say or write or publish what he wants. It secures as well the liberty of each man to decide for himself what he will read and to what he will listen. The Constitution guarantees, in short, a society of free choice.

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 press is the way to eliminate abusiveness ...

For when everything is classified, then nothing is classified, and the system becomes one to be disregarded by the cynical or the careless, and to be manipulated by those intent on self-protection or self-promotion."

[New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971) (concurring)]

To force a lawyer on a defendant can only lead him to believe that the law contrives against him.

I think that the Court's task, in this as in all areas of constitutional adjudication, is not responsibly aided by the uncritical invocation of metaphors like the ' wall of separation,' a phrase nowhere to be found in the Constitution.

It must always be remembered that what the Constitution forbids is not all searches and seizures, but unreasonable searches and seizures.

We dedicated ourselves to a powerful idea - organic law rather than naked power. There seems to be universal acceptance of that idea in the nation.

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 could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.

The dichotomy between personal liberties and property rights is a false one. Property does not have rights. People have rights.