American Supreme Court Justice, b.1924 Popularity:
“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.”
“But the greatest injury of the 'wall' notion is its mischievous diversion of judges from the actual intentions of the drafters of the Bill of Rights. . . . 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.”
“It is impossible to build sound constitutional doctrine upon a mistaken understanding of constitutional history. . . . The establishment clause has been expressly freighted with Jefferson's misleading metaphor for nearly forty years. . . . There is simply no historical foundation for the proposition that the framers intended to build a wall of separation [between church and state]. . . . The recent court decisions are in no way based on either the language or the intent of the framers.”
“It is truly surprising that the state must assign a greater value to a mother's decision to cut off a potential human life by abortion than to a father's decision to let it mature into a live child.”
“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.”
“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.”
