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

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 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.

Saints and mystics throughout history have adorned their realisations with different names and given them different faces and interpretations, but what they are all fundamentally experiencing is the essential nature of the mind.

When she started to play, Steinway came down personally and rubbed his name off the piano.

I’m not going to name some of my colleagues who are very well-known for their television presentation, but they wouldn’t know new information or how to report a story if it came up and bit them.

Deep Throat was a very unfortunate name given to the source by the managing editor of The Washington Post.

The cool part about naming your kid is you don’t have to add six numbers to make sure the name is available.

A bonafide spiritual master is non-different from Supreme Personality of Godhead.

I know real people, whose names I could tell you, people I know who have said “I’ve stopped buying the New York Times.” Why? Because their editorial position has filtered, has leached into the news pages.

It doesn’t seem that long ago to me that the word ‘irreverent’ seemed affixed to my name. ‘Irreverent newcomer.’ I went from irreverent to venerable in what seems to me like the blink of an eye.