Quotes on Court

Freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.

It was better for me when I was joined at the court by a second woman. When I was there alone, there was too much media focus on the one woman, and the minute we got another woman, that changed.

Don't always try to be popular. It isn't possible for everyone to like you. It's far more important for you to like yourself. And when you respect yourself, strangely, you get more respect than when you court it from others.

The first relative I came out to was my aunt Teri, a superior court judge in San Francisco. Her reaction surprised me. 'I've known you were gay for years,' she said. From that moment on I was comfortable in my own skin.

I have ventured to write more intimately about my personal life than is customary for a member of the Supreme Court, and with that candor comes a measure of vulnerability.

I want to thank God, obviously for the health, for the talent He's given me, for my family who supports me, for the things that basketball's taught me on and off the court. For the people that I've been able to meet through the game of basketball.

It's not always about getting better on the basketball court. This game teaches you how to become a better person as well. It pushes you into the team concept.

When I went to law school, which after all was back in the dark ages, we never looked beyond our borders for precedents. As a state court judge, it never would have occurred to me to do so, and when I got to the Supreme Court, it was very much the same. We just didn't do it.

If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins make us seem harmless.

Quietude, which some men cannot abide because it reveals their inward poverty, is as a palace of cedar to the wise, for along its hallowed courts the King in his beauty deigns to walk.

The court is the bureaucracy of the law. If you bureaucratise popular justice then you give it the form of a court.

I just do what I got to do and go out and be myself, on and off the court, and take care of my obligations. That's generally your own destiny-knowing what you have to take care of.

The very purpose of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution is to protect minority rights against majority voters. Every court decision that strikes down discriminatory legislation, including past Supreme Court decisions, affirming the fundamental rights to marry the person you love, overrules a majority decision.

We have over a hundred political detainees, men against whom we are unable to prove anything in a court of law. Nearly 50 of them are men who gave us a great deal of anxiety during the years of Confrontation because they were Malay extremists. Your life and this dinner would not be what it is if my colleagues and I had decided to play it according to the rules of the game.

You can't disobey the rules every time you disapprove. However, when you're considering something that constitutes an extreme abridgement of your rights, conscience is the court of last resort.

The Constitution that I interpret and apply is not living, but dead, or as I prefer to call it, enduring. It means, today, not what current society, much less the court, thinks it ought to mean, but what it meant when it was adopted.

The other reason that I am here today, again from the State Department and from the court record of the court of appeals, is that when I am abroad I speak out against the injustices against the Negro people of this land.

Had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends...every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment.

When I was 12 years old, I was just horrible. My parents were ashamed to watch my matches. I would play on a court at the local club and they would watch from the balcony. They would scream, 'Be quiet' to me and I would scream back, 'Go and have a drink. Leave me alone.' Then we would drive home in a very quiet car. No one speaking to each other.

Defend an institution. Follow the courts or the media, or a court or a newspaper. Do not speak of 'our institutions' unless you are making them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions don't protect themselves. They go down like dominoes unless each is defended from the beginning.

I'd quite like to be in Caligula's court - living in the back room somewhere and just being able to observe.