“The virtue of a democratic system with a [constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech] is that it readily enables the people, over time, to be persuaded that what they took for granted is not so, and to change their laws accordingly.”

In the eyes of government we are just one race here. It is American.

With respect to public acknowledgment of religious belief, it is entirely clear from our nation’s historical practices that the Establishment Clause permits this disregard of polytheists and believers in unconcerned deities, just as it permits the disregard of devout atheists.

It is difficult to maintain the illusion that we are interpreting a Constitution, rather than inventing one.

What is a moderate interpretation of the text? Halfway between what it really means and what you’d like it to mean?

[The] government has room to scale back individual rights during wartime without violating the Constitution. The Constitution just sets minimums. Most of the rights that you enjoy go way beyond what the Constitution requires.

To be honest about it, that is the view of Christians taken by modern society. Surely those who adhere to all or most of these traditional Christian beliefs are to be regarded as simpleminded.

The wise do not investigate such silliness.

Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to find out where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited by the Constitution?

People look at rights as if they were muscles — the more you exercise them, the better they get.

I think the main fight is to dissuade Americans from what the secularists are trying to persuade them to be true: that the separation of church and state means that the government cannot favor religion over nonreligion.

Campaign promises are – by long democratic tradition – the least binding form of human commitment.

Words have meaning. And their meaning doesn’t change.

It would be gross understatement to say that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 is not a model of clarity. It is in many important respects a model of ambiguity or indeed even self-contradiction.

As long as judges tinker with the Constitution to ‘do what the people want,’ instead of what the document actually commands, politicians who pick and confirm new federal judges will naturally want only those who agree with them politically.

[International law] doesn’t show what the Constitution originally meant, and it doesn’t show what is fundamentally important to Americans today. It shows what’s fundamentally important to somebody else today.

A search is a search, even if it happens to disclose nothing but the bottom of a turntable.

You gotta make a change. You see the old way wasn’t working so it’s on us, to do what we gotta do to survive.

Focused with precision, it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change.

Great change always comes down to the actions of a single person.

Change happens when young people pick up the torch and say “we’re going to change the world.”

Fashion changes, but style endures.

We need to change the power structure in America, we need to end the political oligarchy.

When you want to change things, you can’t please everyone. If you do please everyone, you aren’t making enough progress.

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.