Top 100 Quotes About Supreme Court
#1. Jefferson found in the religion phrases of the First Amendment no vague or fuzzy language to be bent or shaped or twisted as suited any Supreme Court Justice or White House incumbent. That amendment had built a wall, with the ecclesiastical estate on one side and the civil estate on the other.
Edwin Gaustad
#2. If we fulfill our responsibility to the Constitution, the Supreme Court will be filled with superior legal minds who will pursue the one agenda that our founding fathers intended in writing the Constitution: justice, rather than political or personal goals.
Chuck Grassley
#3. As the law minister, I had ensured that the government's right to natural resources was protected. The result was evident. The honourable Supreme Court gave the landmark decision in RIL vs RNRL case that the government is the owner of all natural resources.
Veerappa Moily
#4. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the most liberal and illumined of the nine Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Donna Leon
#5. Of the judicial department of the Government, the Supreme Court is the head and representative, and to it must come for final decision all the great legal questions which may arise under the Constitution, the laws, or the treaties of the United States.
Samuel Freeman Miller
#6. Supreme Court Justice Anton Scalia should be commended for acknowledging that his views are so strong that - should the Pledge case reach the Supreme Court - he wouldn't be able to maintain the requisite impartiality.
Michael Newdow
#7. If diversity is what is a central value in every selective university in the United States, then it ought to be seen as a compelling interest by the Supreme Court.
Eleanor Holmes Norton
#8. It's been 80 years since the Senate has confirmed a Supreme Court nominee who was nominated during an election. And particularly when the court hangs in the balance, it makes no sense whatsoever to give Barack Obama the power to jam through a judge in the final election year.
Ted Cruz
#9. We will win an election when all the seats in the House and Senate and the chair behind the desk in the Oval Office and the whole bench of the Supreme Court are filled with people who wish they weren't there.
P. J. O'Rourke
#10. As we watched Judge Clarence
Thomas's Supreme Court confirmation
hearings, all of the commentators
said the same thing: 'One of these
people in the room is lying.' Do you
believe that? You've got two lawyers
and 14 senators in the room, and only
one of them is lying?
Jay Leno
#11. In the United States, the Supreme Court's decision of 1954, outlawing segregation in school systems, was greeted with mixed feelings of hope and skepticism by African-Americans.
John Henrik Clarke
#12. The kind of corruption the media talk about, the kind the Supreme Court was concerned about, involves the putative sale of votes in exchange for campaign contributions.
James L. Buckley
#13. August 19, 1981: President Ronald Reagan nominates Sandra Day O'Connor to be the first woman on the Supreme Court. Male justices who had made noises over the years about resigning if a woman ever joined their ranks stay put.
Irin Carmon
#14. The president typically never does comment on anything involving the Supreme Court cases, Supreme Court ruling, or Supreme Court finding, typically.
Ari Fleischer
#15. When the Supreme Court says baseball isn't run like a business, everybody jumps up and down with joy. When I say the same thing, everybody throws pointy objects at me.
Bill Veeck
#16. That's the fundamental question. Do we have a check and balance system? Do we have three equal branches or do we have one supreme branch, not just the Supreme Court? That's the fundamental question.
Mike Huckabee
#17. The Supreme Court has said that America is a Christian nation. But to make such a statement today causes reporters, newsmen, and many politicians to go ballistic.
D. James Kennedy
#18. The U.S. Supreme Court has established that the tribes own their water. What I'd like to focus on is doing something with the water that results in economic development.
Dave Freudenthal
#19. To hear both critics and defenders talk about the fitness of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court, you'd think the most successful Supreme Court justices had been warm, collegial consensus-builders. But history tells a different story.
Noah Feldman
#20. Justice Harry A. Blackmun, a quirky but pivotal member of the Supreme Court for 24 years, was a hoarder. He seems to have kept everything from his boyhood diaries to college correspondence to every scrap of paper that came his way on the Supreme Court.
Cliff Sloan
#21. Senator, my answer is that the independence and integrity of the Supreme Court requires that nominees before this committee for a position on that court not forecast, give predictions, give hints, about how they might rule in cases that might come before the Supreme Court,.
John Roberts
#22. It's always an uphill battle to defeat a Supreme Court nominee, but this is a fight worth having.
Kim Gandy
#23. It's a matter of balance of power. If the Supreme Court could just make a ruling and everybody has to bow down and fall on their faces and worship that law, it isn't a law because it hasn't been yet passed.
Mike Huckabee
#24. We're a country of laws and rules, and the Supreme Court has ruled that life forms are patentable entities.
Craig Venter
#25. It is good to be back in the Peoples House. But this cannot be a real homecoming. Under the Constitution, I now belong to the executive branch. The Supreme Court has even ruled that I am the executive branchhead, heart, and hand.
Gerald R. Ford
#26. Every generation gets the Constitution that it deserves. As the central preoccupations of an era make their way into the legal system, the Supreme Court eventually weighs in, and nine lawyers in robes become oracles of our national identity.
Noah Feldman
#27. Whether it's before the election or after the election, the principle is the American people are choosing their next president and their next president should pick this Supreme Court nominee.
Mitch McConnell
#28. Supreme Court nominees should know without any doubt that their job is not to impose their own personal opinions of what is right and wrong, but to say what the law is, rather than what they personally think the law ought to be.
Chuck Grassley
#29. In 1967, only 4% of Americans approved of interracial marriage, yet the Supreme Court dismissed the desire of 96% of Americans who did not support it in order to preserve the rights of the minority.
Kathy Baldock
#30. I was not a community organizer before I was elected to the Senate, i spent five and a half years as the solicitor-general of Texas, the chief lawyer for the state of Texas in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Ted Cruz
#31. Thirty-two years after the legalization of abortion by the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, the majority of Americans consider themselves pro-life.
Rick Santorum
#32. You just never know what the Supreme Court is going to do.
John Barrasso
#33. The way that same-sex marriage should reach the federal level is that it absolutely should be decided by the Supreme Court as quickly as possible. It's a 14th Amendment issue. There's no argument about it.
Tony Kushner
#34. You know that recent Supreme Court ruling where a husband can legally murder his wife if he can prove she wouldn't under any circumstances give him a divorce?
Philip K. Dick
#35. We want to bear witness today that we know the relation between corporate greed and what goes on too often in the Supreme Court decisions.
Cornel West
#36. 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.
Sonia Sotomayor
#37. While I have the greatest respect for the Supreme Court's members, I cannot claim familiarity with any particular judicial philosophies the justices might possess.
Patricia Millett
#38. The United States Supreme Court has voted 6-3 that voter photo ID is constitutional.
Bob Ehrlich
#39. The Supreme Court refuses to abandon its convoluted Lemon test. The Lemon test has created havoc, misunderstanding, and hostility toward religion.
Mathew Staver
#40. Sometimes we talk about why we're importing so many people in our workforce. It might be for the last 35 years, we have aborted more than a million people who would have been in our workforce had we not had the holocaust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme Court ruling in 1973.
Mike Huckabee
#41. A year ago my approval rating was in the 30s, my nominee for the Supreme Court had just withdrawn, and my vice president had shot someone. Ah, those were the good ol' days.
George W. Bush
#42. The Supreme Court has held that code is speech. And it doesn't matter that it's done on a computer or done face to face or done in a newspaper, reporting the facts of the world is protected speech.
Jimmy Wales
#43. No senator's vote, except for the declaration of war or the authorization for the use of force, is more important than the confirmation of a nominee for the Supreme Court for a lifetime appointment.
Arlen Specter
#44. Supreme Court nominees should be individuals who not only understand, but truly respect the equal roles and responsibilities of different branches of government and our state governments.
Chuck Grassley
#45. Separation of power says the judiciary committee is supposed to confirm qualified judges and then what the Supreme Court does, that is their function, not my function.
Arlen Specter
#46. Arlen Specter is the man who voted in favor of Bill Clinton during impeachment, voted against Robert Bork for the Supreme Court, voted against school choice for the District of Columbia, endorses an absolutist interpretation of abortion rights. He is bright and he is tough and he belongs elsewhere.
William F. Buckley Jr.
#47. The Supreme Court told me that I should have filed a complaint within six months of the company's first decision to pay me less even though I didn't know about it for nearly two decades.
Lilly Ledbetter
#48. We've got a deeply flawed political system with an insane overreaching extremist element, with a Supreme Court that is completely loony.
Lizz Winstead
#49. Voting for a candidate for the DC circuit is very different from confirming someone to the US Supreme Court. I have been very clear that the Senate should not confirm any nominee in a lame duck session.
Ted Cruz
#50. Most people in America don't believe that "God" is a dirty word, but the sad fact is that some Americans are left to wonder whether the Supreme Court might have greater regard for it if it was.
John Cornyn
#51. The Washington State Supreme Court on Thursday announced a two year suspension for a lawyer caught having jailhouse sex with a triple murder defendant she was representing. Haha! Jokes on you, dummies ... I'm not really a lawyer.
Tina Fey
#52. As the guardian of our rights, the Supreme Court makes decisions every year which either protect the individual or leave him at the mercy of more powerful forces in our society.
Herb Kohl
#53. I was interested in politics very much when I was growing up, and that's what I think I really wanted to be - either a senator, or a Supreme Court Justice, and I always wanted to be a lawyer.
Michael Riedel
#54. The Supreme Court justices are able to decide fewer than 1 percent of all the appeals
James Duane
#55. No matter whether the Constitution follows the flag or not, the Supreme Court follows the election returns.
Finley Peter Dunne
#56. If torture is going to be administered as a last resort in the ticking-bomb case, to save enormous numbers of lives, it ought to be done openly, with accountability, with approval by the president of the United States or by a Supreme Court justice.
Alan Dershowitz
#57. Hitler is still such a popular man; we are afraid of the Hitler myth. We want to give to the German people and to the world the final proof by means of the Supreme Court-Martial and its verdict.
Walther Von Brauchitsch
#58. The Supreme Court could have said, You're just these fringe women in combat boots. But they didn't.
Ariel Levy
#59. In my first week as a U.S. senator, I had the privilege of participating in the Supreme Court confirmation hearing for Judge Sonia Sotomayor.
Al Franken
#60. Anti-abortion activists hope the 20-week abortion ban will be their opening to challenge and ultimately overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court's landmark abortion rights decision.
Anonymous
#61. I am particularly proud of my contributions in recent cases in which the government has argued in the Supreme Court that racial and ethnic quotas should not be allowed and that the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion.
Samuel Alito
#62. The California supreme court, following the English common-law, decided that the owner of land bordering a watercourse was entitled only to the usufruct of the water; that if he used it he must return it to its original course unimpaired in quality and undiminished in volume.
Jerome Hart
#63. We've gone down a road to which we don't have the answers for. That's why we have the schizophrenic decisions coming out of the Supreme Court that don't balance logically with one versus another decision.
Tom Coburn
#64. In 1989, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that minority set-aside programs in municipal contracts were unconstitutional. The court wondered if there were proof that people of color even want to receive municipal contracts.
Karen DeCrow
#65. I am a judge born, raised, and proud of being a Jew. The demand for justice runs through the entirety of the Jewish tradition. I hope, in my years on the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States, I will have the strength and the courage to remain constant in the service of that demand.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
#67. The turning point for me was when the Supreme Court installed Bush in 2000, even though he got half a million votes less nationally than Gore. It was nothing more than a bloodless coup and that's when I really started paying attention.
Mark Edwards
#68. Since the writing of our Constitution, our religious liberties have been systematically threatened and whittled away by Supreme Court justices who interpret the First Amendment as a prohibition against religious activity on public property.
Tim LaHaye
#69. Traditionally, marriage is one arena where states have all but plenary power; it took until 1967 for the Supreme Court to tell states they could not prohibit interracial marriage.
Jeff Greenfield
#70. Free speech has been used by the Supreme Court to give immense power to the wealthiest members of our society.
Noam Chomsky
#71. With Citizens United, the Supreme Court's declaration that corporations are people, the whims of one can silence the voices of millions.
Christine Pelosi
#72. The reversal of a Supreme Court opinion is possible.
Mike Rounds
#73. I deeply regret the damage my original case caused women. I want the Supreme Court to examine the evidence and have a spirit of justice for women and children.
Norma McCorvey
#74. In 1962, the Supreme Court banned organized prayer from public schools. Since then, federal, state, and local courts and officials, including public school administrators, have joined in a nationwide search and destroy mission for student religious practices.
Ralph E. Reed Jr.
#75. These people have elevated audacity to symphonic and operatic levels. The Florida Supreme Court relied on new law to resolve the election dispute down there.
Vincent Bugliosi
#76. We sought justice because equal pay for equal work is an American value. That fight took me ten years. It took me all the way to the Supreme Court. And, in a 5-4 decision, they stood on the side of those who shortchanged my pay, my overtime, and my retirement just because I am a woman.
Lilly Ledbetter
#77. We give Supreme Court justices this freedom because we expect them to remain above the pull of politics, to avoid the effects of public excitement and allow a broader view, not tied to the whims of the majority at a certain moment in history.
Herb Kohl
#78. This is a time when the protections of Americans' liberties are directly at risk, as are the checks and balances that have served to constrain abuses of power for more than 200 years. The Supreme Court is relied upon by all of to us protect our fundamental rights.
Patrick Leahy
#79. It was the courts, of course, that took away prayer from our schools, that took away Bible reading from our schools. It's the courts that gave us same-sex marriage. So it is quite a battlefield, and the Supreme Court is the highest court in the land.
Rod Parsley
#80. The question that arises as we use all these adjectives and adverbs to describe our physicians as we approach a Supreme Court nominee is where are we in America when we decide that it's legal to kill our unborn children?
Tom Coburn
#81. We have never had a president of the United States or a nominee of a major party who was a Supreme Court law clerk.
Jeffrey Toobin
#82. The outcome of the Clarence Thomas hearings and his subsequent appointment to the Supreme Court shows how misguided, narrow notions of racial solidarity that suppress dissent and critique can lead black folks to support individuals who will not protect their rights.
Bell Hooks
#83. I'm convinced that our duty to provide advice and consent for justices of the Supreme Court is our most important constitutional responsibility.
Frank Lautenberg
#84. Last Thursday, our Supreme Court backed that local governments can co-opt private property, and give it to another private entity, for economic development.
Cliff Stearns
#85. In 1905, the Supreme Court of the United States applied the rule to the country's founding document: The Constitution is a written instrument. As such its meaning does not alter. That which it meant when adopted it means now.
Antonin Scalia
#86. It's why we oppose Citizens United from that right-wing Supreme Court. In 2012, I also said the Tea Party "acted like terrorists" and called a donut shop manager in Milwaukee who wanted lower taxes a "smartass." And I said the number one issue is a three-letter word, J-O-B-S." I'm proud of who I am.
Joe Biden
#87. Judge [Gonzalo] Curiel has not said anything, and in fact, cannot say anything. But I would even broaden it out to, you know, judges who are victims of attack ads in say state Supreme Court elections can't talk back. Judges are really barred from commenting on this kind of huge public hue and cry.
Dahlia Lithwick
#88. The authority of the Supreme Court must not be permitted to control the Congress or the Executive when acting in their legislative capacities, but to have only such influence as the force of their reasoning may deserve.
Andrew Jackson
#89. Harriet Miers isn't qualified to play a Supreme Court justice on The West Wing , let alone to be a real one.
Ann Coulter
#90. Strangely enough, politics may just be the one realm in which having kids imposes no penalty on women. Kids are practically a necessity. For scientists, or Supreme Court justices, or chief executives, or the woman who wants to learn to fly F-l8s off an aircraft carrier, it works differently.
Stacy Schiff
#91. The Supreme Court and courts in general have been usurping the role of the legislative branch of government.
Todd Akin
#92. I want to create a culture of life where every innocent human life is welcome to the world. I know those are difficult cases, but I am prolife. And I understand we've got to go through the Supreme Court.
Bobby Jindal
#93. I agree with the (Supreme Court's) holding that racial discrimination in higher education admissions will be illegal in 25 years. They are illegal now.
Clarence Thomas
#94. It wasn't the Supreme Court that expelled God from our public school classrooms. It was the textbook publishers.
James J. Kilpatrick
#95. While appropriation art is critical to art, it's an ambiguous art form in the world of the Supreme Court.
Lawrence Lessig
#96. If money is a form of speech, as the Supreme Court has regrettably found, rich donors will always be the loudest speakers.
Howard Dean
#97. We have to respect that any nominee to the Supreme Court would have to defer any comments on any matters, which are either before the court or very likely to be before the court.
Edward Kennedy
#98. If corporations are people, as the Supreme Court wishes us to believe, they are stunningly unpatriotic ones.
Timothy Noah
#99. A Supreme Court decision that concessions of this sort were unconstitutional would have taken them off the table and actually increased the effective sovereignty of elected officials.
Michael Kinsley
#100. In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court ruled President Obama's healthcare mandate is constitutional. This is a major victory for President Obama, who spent three years promoting it, and a major setback for Mitt Romney, who spent three years creating it.
Jay Leno
