“It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”

To complain of the age we live in, to murmur at the present possessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant hopes of the future, are the common dispositions of the greatest part of mankind.

If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free; if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

All the forces of darkness need to succeed … is for the people to do nothing.

History is a pact between the dead, the living, and the yet unborn.

There is no safety for honest men, but by believing all possible evil of evil men, and by acting with promptitude, decision, and steadiness on that belief.

When you fear something, learn as much about it as you can. Knowledge conquers fear.

It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.

Great men are never sufficiently shown but in struggles.

An event has happened, upon which it is difficult to speak, and impossible to be silent.

People must be taken as they are, and we should never try make them or ourselves better by quarreling with them.

In history, a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind.

We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature.

A great empire and little minds go ill together.

The grave is a common treasury, to which we must all be taken.

The use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment; but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again; and a nation is not governed, which is perpetually to be conquered.

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

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

Our Constitution was not intended to be used by … any group to foist its personal religious beliefs on the rest of us.

[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.

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?

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.

There is nothing new in the realization that the Constitution sometimes insulates the criminality of a few in order to protect the privacy of us all.