Potter Stewart Quotes

#1. Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have the right to do and what is the right thing to do. Potter Stewart,

Max Allan Collins

#2. On June 19, 1981, a vigorously healthy Justice Potter Stewart resigned from the Supreme Court at the age of 66.

Elliott Abrams

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

Potter Stewart

#4. 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 ...

Potter Stewart

#5. I was a businessman for 16 years of my life, so when I started writing, I wanted to keep my literary identity separate.

Ashwin Sanghi

#6. Maybe that's why people have friends at all. Not because they like them so much but because they don't make them feel so much worse.

Joe Meno

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

Potter Stewart

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

Potter Stewart

#9. 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.

Potter Stewart

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

Potter Stewart

#11. 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.

Potter Stewart

#12. The right to enjoy property without unlawful deprivation, no less that the right to speak out or the right to travel is, in truth, a "personal" right.

Potter Stewart

#13. Fairness is what justice really is.

Potter Stewart

#14. One foe at a time, that was what the old man always said.

George R R Martin

#15. Again.
Apparently, three broken engagements weren't enough. It was her duty to marry, and marry she must.

Monica McCarty

#16. 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.

Potter Stewart

#17. I shall not attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description (of pornography), and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.

Potter Stewart

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

Potter Stewart

#19. 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.

Potter Stewart

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

Potter Stewart

#21. We are concerned here only with the imposition of capital punishment for the crime of murder, and when a life has been taken deliberately by the offender, we cannot say that the punishment is invariably disproportionate to the crime. It is an extreme sanction suitable to the most extreme of crimes.

Potter Stewart

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

Potter Stewart

#23. May the state fence in the harmless mentally ill solely to save its citizens from exposure to those whose ways are different? One might as well ask if the state, to avoid public unease, could incarcerate all who are physically unattractive or socially eccentric.

Potter Stewart

#24. 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.

Potter Stewart

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

Potter Stewart

#26. Our # imagination is ten times more potent than our # willpower .

Tony Robbins

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

Potter Stewart

#28. Swift justice demands more than just swiftness.

Potter Stewart

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

Potter Stewart

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

Potter Stewart