“Inaction without more is not tantamount to choice.”

The great generalities of the constitution have a content and a significance that vary from age to age.

Prophecy, however honest, is generally a poor substitute for experience.

Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.

There is in each of us a stream of tendency, whether you choose to call it philosophy or not, which gives coherence and direction to thought and action. Judges cannot escape that current any more than other mortals.

Method is much, technique is much, but inspiration is even more.

The constant assumption runs throughout the law that the natural and spontaneous evolutions of habit fix the limits of right and wrong.

Justice, though due to the accused, is due the accuser also. The concept of fairness cannot be strained till it is narrowed to a filament. We are to keep our balance true.

Law never is, but is always about to be.

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.

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.

Choice is a determinant in personal development … by my free acts I am making myself.

The rare scholars who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines.

I get more choices of things, projects, which is a blessing and a curse. I can only do one at a time. Sometimes you don’t know which way to go.

Having no children had been a kind of choice up to the moment when, from a choice, it became a sadness.

I began to realize that poverty was really more of a choice than anything else and that I could change that. And it just really depended on how hard I wanted to work.

Am I getting better at making choices? Well, I think I might be getting better at reading scripts.

Our creator says, ‘Here’s your birth and here’s your death’ – and the rest are the things you learn on your journey. This was my experience – and the choice is, I can lay in the misery, or choose to learn from it and move on.

In other words, the market is not a weighing machine, on which the value of each issue is recorded by an exact and impersonal mechanism, in accordance with its specific qualities.