Potter Stewart Quotes (17 Quotes)


    Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do.

    These death sentences are cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual.

    At the very least, the freedom that Congress is empowered to secure includes the freedom to buy whatever a white man can buy, the right to live wherever a white man can live. If Congress cannot say that being a freeman means at least this much, then the 13th Amendment made a promise it cannot keep.

    In fact, a fundamental interdependence exists between the personal right to liberty and the personal right to property.

    A person's mere propinquity to others independently suspected of criminal activity does not give rise to probable cause to search that person.


    To force a lawyer on a defendant can only lead him to believe that the law contrives against him.

    Newspapers, television networks, and magazines have sometimes been outrageously abusive, untruthful, arrogant, and hypocritical. But it hardly follows that elimination of a strong and independent press is the way to eliminate abusiveness . . .

    Abortion is inherently different from other medical procedures because no other procedure involves the purposeful termination of a potential life.

    The Court today holds the Congress may say that some of the poor are too poor even to go bankrupt. I cannot agree.


    Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself.

    For me this is not something that can be swept under the rug and forgotten in the interest of forced Sunday togetherness.

    The 4th Amendment and the personal rights it secures have a long history. At the very core stands the right of a man to retreat into his own home and there be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion.

    I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material but I know it when I see it.

    It must always be remembered that what the Constitution forbids is not all searches and seizures, but unreasonable searches and seizures.

    The dichotomy between personal liberties and property rights is a false one. Property does not have rights. People have rights.



    More Potter Stewart Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Property - Liberty & Freedom - Government - Congress - Man - Crime - Confidence - People - Ethics - Television - Potential - Life - History - Facts - Constitution - Arrogance - Promise - Law & Regulation - Fairness - View All Potter Stewart Quotations

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    Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. - William Rehnquist - William Blackstone - Sonia Sotomayor - Joshua Willis Alexander - Horace Gray - Giovanni Falcone - Clarence Thomas - Byron White - Benjamin Cardozo


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