Potter Stewart Quotations

Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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 . . .

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.

The First Amendment guarantees liberty of human expression in order to preserve in our Nation what Mr. Justice Holmes called a "free trade in ideas." To that end, the Constitution protects more than just a man's freedom to say or write or publish what he wants. It secures as well the liberty of each man to decide for himself what he will read and to what he will listen. The Constitution guarantees, in short, a society of free choice.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Fairness is what justice really is.

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.

Swift justice demands more than just swiftness.