33 Quotes by Potter Stewart

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

Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.

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.

The equal protection standard of the constitution has one clear and central meaning - it absolutely prohibits invidious [repugnant] discrimination by government...Under our Constitution, any official action that treats a person differently on account of his race or ethnic origin is inherently [by nature] suspect and presumptively [probably] invalid...Under the Constitution we have, one practice in which government may never engage in the practice of racism - not even "temporarily" and not even as an "experiment."

I think that the Court's task, in this as in all areas of constitutional adjudication, is not responsibly aided by the uncritical invocation of metaphors like the ' wall of separation,' a phrase nowhere to be found in the Constitution.

The right to defy an unconstitutional statute is basic in our scheme. Even when an ordinance requires a permit to make a speech, to deliver a sermon, to picket, to parade, or to assemble, it need not be honored when it's invalid on its face.

We dedicated ourselves to a powerful idea - organic law rather than naked power. There seems to be universal acceptance of that idea in the nation.

For the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection. But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.

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 . . .