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

A law can be both economic folly and constitutional.

If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder? Can we have it against other things?

If you’re going to be a good and faithful judge, you have to resign yourself to the fact that you’re not always going to like the conclusions you reach. If you like them all the time, you’re probably doing something wrong.

Why in the world would you have it interpreted by nine lawyers?

Power tends to corrupt. But the power in Washington resides in Congress, if it wants to use it. It can do anything-it can stop the Vietnam War. It can make its will felt, if it can ever get its act together to do anything.

In a big family the first child is kind of like the first pancake. If it’s not perfect, that’s okay, there are a lot more coming along.

Rather than rewriting the law under the pretense of interpreting it, the Court should have left it to Congress to decide what to do about the Act’s limitation of tax credits to state Exchanges.

Devout Christians are destined to be regarded as fools in modern society. We are fools for Christ’s sake. We must pray for courage to endure the scorn of the sophisticated world.

You could have 50 different states having 50 different regulations until they were all litigated out.

Who ever thought that intimacy and spirituality [whatever that means] were freedoms? And if intimacy is, one would think Freedom of Intimacy is abridged rather than expanded by marriage. Ask the nearest hippie.

The attitude of people associating guns with nothing but crime, that is what has to be changed. I grew up at a time when people were not afraid of people with firearms.

Day by day, case by case, the Supreme Court is busy designing a Constitution for a country I do not recognize.

But I also believe that a lot of gun owners would agree that AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not on the streets of our cities.

Under all the usual rules of interpretation, in short, the Government should lose this case. But normal rules of interpretation seem always to yield to the overriding principle of the present Court: The Affordable Care Act must be saved.

On this day, when we’re celebrating our constitutional heritage, I urge you to be faithful to that heritage – to impose on our fellow citizens only the restrictions that are there in the Constitution, not invent new ones, not to invent the right because it’s a good idea.

A journalistic purpose could be someone with a Xerox machine in a basement.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

The whole world recognizes Russia’s cultural achievements. It is impossible to imagine the world culture without Russian culture, without our music and literature.

It has become almost a cliché to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.

For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.

There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.

Literature, it seems to me, is wisdom.

All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.