It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have been forged in controversies involving not very nice people..

Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late..

Freedom of expression is the well-spring of our civilization... The history of civilization is in considerable measure the displacement of error whic….

The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards..

The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes..

Democracy is always a beckoning goal, not a safe harbor. For freedom is an unremitting endeavor, never a final achievement..

It is hostile to a democratic system to involve the judiciary in the politics of the people..

The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day. It does come, however slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restri….

Fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalised medium of reason, that's all we have between us and the tyranny of mere will and ….

All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out o….

In the first place, lawyers better remember they are human beings, and a human being who hasn't his periods of doubts and distresses and disappointme….

It is easy to make light of insistence on scrupulous regard for the safeguards of civil liberties when invoked on behalf of the unworthy. It is too e….

The mark of a truly civilized man is confidence in the strength and security derived from the inquiring mind..

A court which yields to the popular will thereby licenses itself to practice despotism, for there can be no assurance that it will not, on another oc….

If one man can be allowed to determine for himself what is law, every man can. That means first chaos, then tyranny. Legal process is an essential pa….

Ultimately there can be no freedom for self unless it is vouchsafed for others; there can be no security where there is fear, and a democratic societ….

Freedom of speech and of the press are essential to the enlightenment of a free people and in restraining those who wield power..

We have enjoyed so much freedom for so long that we are perhaps in danger of forgetting how much blood it cost to establish the Bill of Rights..

Anybody who is any good is different from anybody else..

It is a wise man who said that there is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals..

The ultimate touchstone of constitutionality is the Constitution itself, and not what we have said about it..