Abe Fortas Quotes

#1. Needless, heedless, wanton and deliberate injury of the sort inflicted by Life's picture story is not an essential instrument of responsible journalism.

Abe Fortas

#2. Dissent and dissenters have no monopoly on freedom. They must tolerate opposition. They must accept dissent from their dissent.

Abe Fortas

#3. It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.

Abe Fortas

#4. The story of man is the history, first, of the acceptance and imposition of restraints necessary to permit communal life; and second, of the emancipation of the individual within that system of necessary restraints.

Abe Fortas

#5. For a justice of this ultimate tribunal [the U.S. Supreme Court], the opportunity for self-discovery and the occasion for self-revelation is great.

Abe Fortas

#6. Government ... may not be hostile to any religion or to the advocacy of no-religion; and it may not aid, foster, or promote one religion or religious theory against another ... The First Amendment mandates governmental neutrality ...

Abe Fortas

#7. In order for the State in the person of school officials to justify prohibition of a particular expression of opinion, it must be able to show that its action was caused by something more than a mere desire to avoid the discomfort and unpleasantness that always accompany an unpopular viewpoint.

Abe Fortas

#8. Judging is a lonely job in which a man is, as near as may be, an island entire.

Abe Fortas