Historians From The United States

"Well, I think it's a very good job. One of the most appealing things about it is that... it enables you to participate in some way and to some extent in the way the country is governed but you're able to maintain a private life as well."

"I want to put to rest the speculation and unfounded rumors of my imminent retirement... I am not about to announce my retirement. I will continue to perform my duties as chief justice as long as my health permits."

"The framers of our Constitution came up with two major contributions to the art of government. The first was the idea of an executive not dependent on the political support of the legislature. The second was the idea of the judiciary independent of the executive and legislative branches."

"Our judges will not continue to represent the diverse face of America if only the well-to-do or the mediocre are willing to become judges."

"Inadequate compensation seriously compromises the judicial independence fostered by life tenure. That low salaries might force judges to return to the private sector rather than stay on the bench risks affecting judicial performance. . . Every time an experienced judge leaves the bench, the nation suffers temporary loss in judicial productivity. Diminishing judicial salaries affects not only those who have become judges but also the pool of those willing to be considered for a position on the federal bench."

"A judge who is a 'strict constructionist' in constitutional matters will generally not be favorably inclined toward claims of either criminal defendants or civil rights plaintiffs—the latter two groups having been the principal beneficiaries of the Supreme Court's 'broad constructionist' reading of the Constitution."

"It has been said that Sweden's loss has been America's gain, and I think this is true. Swedish immigrants and their descendants have contributed a great deal to America and it is worthwhile to remember our Swedish heritage."

"As for the name Rehnquist, I am quite uncertain as to its origin. Under the Swedish patronymic system of naming, my grandfather and his brothers would have been named Anderson, since Anders was the name of their father. "Quist" in Swedish means branch, I am told. For example, "Lindquist" means lime branch or linden branch, and Palmquist means palm branch. The best I can come up with is that the "rehn" in my name refers to a small village near the farm on which my grandfather grew up."

"Actually, the Swedish genealogists were so good that I found out more than I wanted to about my Swedish ancestors: one of them in the 17th century was executed for having embezzled funds from an estate for which he was the steward."

"I've often started off with a lawyer joke, a complete caricature of a lawyer who's been nasty, greedy, and unethical. But I've stopped that practice. I gradually realized that the lawyers in the audience didn't think the jokes were funny and the non-lawyers didn't know they were jokes."

"When you are young and impecunious, society conditions you to exchange time for money, and this is quite as it should be. Very few people are hurt by having to work for a living. But as you become more affluent, it somehow is very, very difficult to reverse that process and begin trading money for time."

"An oft-heard description of the Supreme Court is that it is the ultimate protector in our society of the liberties of the individual. This phrase describes an important role of the Supreme Court, but by ignoring other equally important functions of the Court, it has a potential for mischief. It is a fairly short leap from this language to a feeling that the US Constitution is somehow "vindicated" every time a claim of individual right against government is upheld, and is not vindicated whenever such a claim is not upheld. But this, of course, cannot be the case. The role of the Supreme Court is to uphold those claims of individual liberty that it finds are well-founded in the Constitution, and to reject other claims against the government that it concludes are not well-founded. Its role is no more to exclusively uphold the claims of the individual than it is to exclusively uphold the claims of the government: It must hold the constitutional balance true between these claims."

"Somewhere "out there," beyond the walls of the courthouse, run currents and tides of public opinion which lap at the courtroom door."

"The Supreme Court is an institution far more dominated by centrifugal forces, pushing toward individuality and independence, than it is by centripetal forces pulling for hierarchical ordering and institutional unity."

"It is about time the Court faced the fact that the white people in the South don't like the colored people; the Constitution restrains them from effecting this dislike through state action, but it most assuredly did not appoint the Court as a sociological watchdog to rear up every time private discrimination raises its admittedly ugly head. To the extent that this decision advances the frontier of state action and 'social gain,' it pushes back the frontier of freedom of association and majority rule."

"[T]he Constitution does not guarantee the right to acquire information at a public library without any risk of embarrassment."

"A public library does not acquire Internet terminals in order to create a public forum for Web publishers to express themselves, any more than it collects books in order to provide a public forum for the authors of books to speak."

"At the heart of the First Amendment is the recognition of the fundamental importance of the free flow of ideas and opinions on matters of public interest and concern. The freedom to speak one's mind is not only an aspect of individual liberty – and thus a good unto itself – but also is essential to the common quest for truth and the vitality of society as a whole. We have therefore been particularly vigilant to ensure that individual expressions of ideas remain free from governmentally imposed sanctions. The First Amendment recognizes no such thing as a "false" idea."

"[Jury selection] is best based upon seat-of-the-pants instincts, which are undoubtedly crudely stereotypical and may in many cases be hopelessly mistaken."

"The considered professional judgment of the Air Force is that the traditional outfitting of personnel in standardized uniforms encourages the subordination of personal preferences and identities in favor of the overall group mission."

"No amount of repetition of historical errors in judicial opinions can make the errors true. The "wall of separation between church and State" is a metaphor based on bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned."

"The Constitution requires that Congress treat similarly situated persons similarly, not that it engage in gestures of superficial equality."

"This result […] will daily stand as a veritable sword of Damocles over every succeeding president and his advisers."

"Pregnancy is of course confined to women, but it is in other ways significantly different from the typical covered disease or disability."

"It is, I believe, impossible to justify the sacrifice of even a portion of our historic individual freedom for a purpose such as [giving blacks, Latinos and Jews the right to be served in local motels, hotels and restaurants]."

"[I]f...a society adopts a constitution and incorporates in that constitution safeguards of individual liberty, these safeguards do indeed take on a general moral rightness or goodness. They assume a general social acceptance neither because of any intrinsic worth nor because of any unique origins in someone's idea of natural justice but instead simply because they have been incorporated in a constitution by the people."

"All nine of the justices on the Court at that time - Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas, O'Connor, Kennedy, Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer - were extremely intelligent. But even in that room Rehnquist stood out. He had been first in his class at Stanford Law and he had a photographic memory, unlike any I'd ever encountered. My first impression of him proved right. He really didn't need law clerks. He was so damned smart. Most of the justices had law clerks prepare long bench memos on cases. Rehnquist didn't need that. He just wanted three-page summaries of the facts. He knew all the rest already."

"[Rehnquist] was funny and charming, very bright and quick. He could give you all the good conservative arguments on any issue. He had no sympathy for criminal defendants — none. When you talked about the problem of the cities or the poor or blacks, it was clear he had no understanding. It was a universe he didn't comprehend."

"Well, it's just a sense of personal satisfaction. Just like taking a good photograph or painting a picture or playing a good golf game or something, it's the thing in itself that justifies it."

"The court has built a great deal of prestige, and I think is generally quite well thought of as a public institution in the country. It is always possible for the court to overreach its proper bounds and perhaps declare a lot of laws unconstitutional and frustrate the will of the majority in a way that it ought not be frustrated. In that sense, it poses a danger, but not the same sort of perhaps very active danger that a run-away Congress or runaway executive would."

"Perhaps you should say there should be mandatory retirement even of members of the court, members of the federal judiciary. I'm sure there can be questions about whether one does as good work when you get into your—you know, I'm 67."

"If you could say of any one individual that the court as an institution is the length and shadow of that individual, surely it would be John Marshall."

"I think Alexander Hamilton has received a little bit of short shrift from history, and I think Jefferson has been treated a little bit too generously. I admire them both, but I admire them both about equally."

"The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion,… In the long run it will create a generation incapable of appreciating the difference between independence of thought and subservience."

"A nation that silences or intimidates original minds is left only with unoriginal minds and cannot hope to hold its own in the competition of peace or of war."

"There are limits on liberty, as there are limits on authority. The broad principle of those limits is generally recognized and accepted; no liberties may be exercised so as to injure others or injure the community."

"We must therefore look with grave misgivings upon the psychology of the ‘crusade’ or on the notion that we can make the world over in our own image either by persuasion or by coercion."

"By insisting upon conformity in the intellectual arena and by threatening with disapproval all those who dissent or who give us unpopular advice, we are in danger of following the totalitarian philosophy—and the totalitarian mistakes."

"We do not protect freedom in order to indulge error. We protect freedom in order to discover truth."

"The most effective censorship is not, in fact, legal; in a democracy—as Tocqueville pointed out in Democracy in America—it is public opinion."

"If you are going to penalize disloyalty, you must first determine what loyalty is; if you are going to silence nonconformity, you must determine what conformity is—and to what it conforms."

"Uncertain of principles, we fall back on emotion; unfamiliar with the past, we are afraid of the future. Increasingly we look to men, ideas, and institutions not from the point of view of how they work, but from the point of view of how they ought to work…"

"If the preservation of our freedom depends upon the courts then we are, indeed, lost, for in the long run neither courts nor Constitution can save us from our own errors, follies, or wickedness."

"This approach emphasizes what was once familiar enough to all Americans—and what we are now in danger of forgetting—that government derives its power from men; that rights of life and liberty are inalienable; that these rights are not something that government graciously confers upon men, but things no government can take away from men."

"Freedom in not a luxury that we can indulge in when at last we have security and prosperity and enlightenment; it is, rather, antecedent to all of these, for without it we can have neither security nor prosperity nor enlightenment."

"Independence was an act of revolution; republicanism was something new under the sun; the federal system was a vast experimental laboratory. Physically Americans were pioneers; in the realm of social and economic institutions, too, their tradition has been one of pioneering. From the beginning, intellectual and spiritual diversity have been as characteristic of America as racial and linguistic. The most distinctively American philosophies have been transcendentalism — which is the philosophy of the Higher Law and pragmatism — which is the philosophy of experimentation and pluralism. These two principles are the very core of Americanism: the principle of the Higher Law, or of obedience to the dictates of conscience rather than of statutes, and the principle of pragmatism, or the rejection of a single good and of the notion of a finished universe. From the beginning Americans have known that there were new worlds to conquer, new truths to be discovered. Every effort to confine Americanism to a single pattern, to constrain it to a single formula, is disloyalty to everything that is valid in Americanism."

"The American people have a stake in the maintenance of the most thorough-going inquisition into American institutions. They have a stake in nonconformity, for they know that the American genius is nonconformist."

"Who are those who are really disloyal? Those who inflame racial hatreds, who sow religious and class dissensions. Those who subvert the Constitution by violating the freedom of the ballot box. Those who make a mockery of majority rule by the use of the filibuster. Those who impair democracy by denying equal educational facilities. Those who frustrate justice by lynch law or by making a farce of jury trials. Those who deny freedom of speech and of the press and of assembly. Those who press for special favors against the interest of the commonwealth. Those who regard public office as a source of private gain. Those who would exalt the military over the civil. Those who for selfish and private purposes stir up national antagonisms and expose the world to the ruin of war."

"Who among American heroes could meet their tests, who would be cleared by their committees? Not Washington, who was a rebel. Not Jefferson, who wrote that all men are created equal and whose motto was "rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God." Not Garrison, who publicly burned the Constitution; or Wendell Phillips, who spoke for the underprivileged everywhere and counted himself a philosophical anarchist; not Seward of the Higher Law or Sumner of racial equality. Not Lincoln, who admonished us to have malice toward none, charity for all; or Wilson, who warned that our flag was "a flag of liberty of opinion as well as of political liberty"; or Justice Holmes, who said that our Constitution is an experiment and that while that experiment is being made "we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death.""

"What is the new loyalty? It is, above all, conformity. It is the uncritical and unquestioning acceptance of America as it is — the political institutions, the social relationships, the economic practices. It rejects inquiry into the race question or socialized medicine, or public housing, or into the wisdom or validity of our foreign policy. It regards as particularly heinous any challenge to what is called "the system of private enterprise," identifying that system with Americanism. It abandons evolution, repudiates the once popular concept of progress, and regards America as a finished product, perfect and complete."