When a judge assumes the power to decide which distinctions made in a statute are legitimate and which are not, he assumes the power to disapprove of any and all legislation, because all legislation makes distinctions.

The notion that Congress can change the meaning given a constitutional provision by the Court is subversive of the function of judicial review; and it is not the less so because the Court promises to allow it only when the Constitution is moved to the left.

The right to procreate is not guaranteed, explicitly or implicitly, by the Constitution.

An egalitarian educational system is necessarily opposed to meritocracy and reward for achievement. It is inevitably opposed to procedures that might reveal differing levels of achievement.

When a judge assumes the power to decide which distinctions made in a statute are legitimate and which are not, he assumes the power to disapprove of any and all legislation, because all legislation makes distinctions.

Those who made and endorsed our Constitution knew man’s nature, and it is to their ideas, rather than to the temptations of utopia, that we must ask that our judges adhere.

Modernity, the child of the Enlightenment, failed when it became apparent that the good society cannot be achieved by unaided reason.

The major obstacle to a religious renewal is the intellectual classes, who are highly influential and tend to view religion as primitive superstition. They believe that science has left atheism as the only respectable intellectual stance.

I don’t think the Constitution is studied almost anywhere, including law schools. In law schools, what they study is what the court said about the Constitution. They study the opinions. They don’t study the Constitution itself.

The purpose that brought the fourteenth amendment into being was equality before the law, and equality, not separation, was written into the law.

In a constitutional democracy the moral content of law must be given by the morality of the framer or legislator, never by the morality of the judge.

I was thinking of resigning since I did not want to be perceived as a man who did the president’s bidding to save my job. I have had some time to think about it since. I think I did the right thing.

Law is vulnerable to the winds of intellectual or moral fashion, which it then validates as the commands of our most basic concept.

A society deadened by a smothering network of laws while finding release in moral chaos is not likely to be either happy or stable.

Being ‘at the mercy of legislative majorities’ is merely another way of describing the basic American plan: representative democracy.

It is a ship with a great deal of sail but a very shallow keel.