“Danger invites rescue. … The wrongdoer may not have foreseen the coming of a deliverer. He is accountable as if he had.”

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.

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.

There are dozens of young poets and fictioneers most of them a little insane in the tradition of James Joyce, who, however insane they may be, have refused to be genteel and traditional and dull.

Do not taste food while you’re cooking. You may lose your nerve to serve it.

That they may have a little peace, even the best dogs are compelled to snarl occasionally.

I don’t care how much you may think they’re funny or how interesting they may sound. If we nominate someone that 40 to 50 percent of our party doesn’t – can’t stand, we are going to lose.

It may, however, be said that the level of experience to which concepts are inapplicable cannot yield any knowledge of a universal character, for concepts alone are capable of being socialized.

The truth is every problem can’t be solved by government. Many are caused by the moral breakdown in our society. And the answers to those challenges lie primarily in our families and our faiths, not our politicians.

We’re all complicit in the things we may be trying to oppose. I’m complicit in the things that I’m trying to oppose.

Teach us to pray that we may cause The enemy to flee, That we his evil power may bind, His prisoners to free.