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

Bear in mind that brains and learning, like muscle and physical skill, are articles of commerce. They are bought and sold. You can hire them by the year or by the hour. The only thing in the world not for sale is character.

The purpose of the Federalist Society was to bring together young people who had this skepticism about what they were being taught and to let them know that there were others who shared this skepticism.

To many Americans, everything from the Easter morning to the Ascension had to be made up by the groveling enthusiasts as part of their plan to get themselves martyred.

One can be sophisticated and believe in God. Reason and intellect are not to be laid aside where matters of religion are concerned.

Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn’t.

This is an execution, not surgery. Where does that come from, that you must find the method of execution that causes the least pain?

Why can’t the state accede to the public’s wishes?

The principal purpose of stare decisis is to protect reliance interest and further stability in the law.

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.

[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.

We are but a point, a single comma, and God is the literature of eternity.

My father literally fought his entire life to ensure the inclusion of all people because he understood that we were intertwined and connected together in humanity.

Politics in a literary work, is like a gun shot in the middle of a concert, something vulgar, and however, something which is impossible to ignore.

In his eyes, she was both poetry and literature.

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap – people shouldn’t read that stuff.

I suppose I’ve always been attracted to this sort of outsider in general – in literature, in music, politics, whatever – and to the person that is able to be relentlessly themselves. I don’t think that I have that quality, that strength of mind.

I’m interested in pressure, I’m interested in duress. All the great works of art, or film or literature, in my opinion, have elements of those in them.

Not a wasted word. This has been a main point to my literary thinking all my life.