“The First Amendment serves not only the needs of the polity but also those of the human spirit – a spirit that demands self-expression .”

I’m the world’s original gradualist. I just think ninety-odd years is gradual enough.

The measure of a country’s greatness is its ability to retain compassion in time of crisis.

Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men’s minds.

The death penalty is no more effective a deterrent than life imprisonment. It is also evident that the burden of capital punishment falls upon the poor, the ignorant and the underprivileged members of society.

Ending racial discrimination in jury selection can be accomplished only by eliminating peremptory challenges entirely.

Equal means getting the same thing, at the same time and in the same place.

The Constitution was a product of its times.

Classifications and distinctions based on race or color have no moral or legal validity in our society. They are contrary to our constitution and laws.

What is the quality of your intent?

We must dissent from the fear.

We can always stick together when we are losing, but tend to find means of breaking up when we’re winning.

I cannot accept this invitation for I do not believe that the meaning of the Constitution was forever ‘fixed’ at the Philadelphia Convention… To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start. [Progressive]

Mere access to the courthouse doors does not by itself assure a proper functioning of the adversary process.

History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure.

Lawlessness is lawlessness. Anarchy is anarchy is anarchy. Neither race nor color nor frustration is an excuse for either lawlessness or anarchy.

The process of democracy is one of change. Our laws are not frozen into immutable form, they are constantly in the process of revision in response to the needs of a changing society.

Knowledge of the means to express our emotion is essential- and is acquired only after a very long experience.

Literature expresses itself by abstractions, whereas painting, by means of drawing and colour, gives concrete shape to sensations and perceptions.

With a painter’s temperament, all that’s needed are the means of expression sufficient to be intelligible to the wide public.

Man alone at the very moment of his birth, cast naked upon the naked earth, does she abandon to cries and lamentations.

And this is one of the major questions of our lives: how we keep boundaries, what permission we have to cross boundaries, and how we do so.

If a family is an expression of continuity through biology, a city is an expression of continuity through will amd imagination? through mental choices making artifice, not through physical reproduction.

Traveling is one expression of the desire to cross boundaries.

Your words and wishes are cheap if they do not find expression in your actual gifts.