“What has once been settled by a precedent will not be unsettled overnight, for certainty and uniformity are gains not lightly sacrificed. Above all is this true when honest men have shaped their conduct on the faith of the pronouncement.”

The Constitution was framed upon the theory that the peoples of the several states must sink or swim together, and that in the long run prosperity and salvation are in union and not division.

In the end the great truth will have been learned that the quest is greater than what is sought, the effort finer that the prize (or rather, that the effort is the prize), the victory cheap and hollow were it not for the rigor of the game.

Inaction without more is not tantamount to choice.

The validity of a tax depends upon its nature, and not upon its name.

The difference is no less real because it is of degree.

Due process is a growth too sturdy to succumb to the infection of the least ingredient of error.

We seek to find peace of mind in the word, the formula, the ritual. The hope is illusion.

With traps and obstacles and hazards confronting us on every hand, only blindness or indifference will fail to turn in all humility, for guidance or for warning, to the study of examples.

Consequences cannot alter statutes, but may help to fix their meaning.

It is for ordinary minds, not for psychoanalysts, that our rules of evidence are framed. They have their source very often in considerations of administrative convenience, or practical expediency, and not in rules of logic.

Every human being of adult years and sound mind has a legal right to determine what shall be done with his own body.

The risk to be percieved defines the duty to be obeyed.

The great tides and currents which engulf the rest of men do not turn aside in their course and pass the judges by.

Code is followed by commentary, and commentary by revision, and thus the task is never done.

Not honesty alone, but the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive, is then the standard of behavior.

Fraud includes the pretense of knowledge when knowledge there is none.