“If you think aficionados of a living Constitution want to bring you flexibility, think again. You think the death penalty is a good idea? Persuade your fellow citizens to adopt it. You want a right to abortion? Persuade your fellow citizens and enact it. That’s flexibility.”

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.

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.