Earl Warren Quotes

In civilized life, law floats in a sea of ethics.

The Brown case and the changes it brought causes many people to believe that it was the most important case of my tenure on the Court. That appraisal may be correct, but I have never thought so. It seemed to me that accolade should go to the case of Baker v. Carr (1962), which was the progenitor of the "one man, one vote" rule.

There is patently no legitimate overriding purpose independent of invidious racial discrimination which justifies this classification. The fact that Virginia prohibits only interracial marriages involving white persons demonstrates that the racial classifications must stand on their own justification, as measures designed to maintain White Supremacy. We have consistently denied the constitutionality of measures which restrict the rights of citizens on account of race. There can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the Equal Protection Clause.

"The man of character, sensitive to the meaning of what he is doing, will know how to discover the ethical paths in the maze of possible behavior." - Earl Warren

The man of character, sensitive to the meaning of what he is doing, will know how to discover the ethical paths in the maze of possible behavior.

In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the State has undertaken to provide it, is a right that must be made available to all on equal terms.

Many people consider the things government does for them to be social progress but they regard the things government does for others as socialism.

The fantastic advances in the field of electronic communication constitute a greater danger to the privacy of the individual.

Legislators represent people, not trees or acres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests. As long as ours is a representative form of government, and our legislatures are those instruments of government elected directly by and directly representative of the people, the right to elect legislators in a free and unimpaired fashion is a bedrock of our political system.

The abhorrence of society to the use of involuntary confessions does not turn alone on their inherent untrustworthiness. It also turns on the deep-rooted feeling that the police must obey the law while enforcing the law; that, in the end, life and liberty can be as much endangered from illegal methods used to convict those thought to be criminals as from the actual criminals themselves.

You sit up there, and you see the whole gamut of human nature. Even if the case being argued involves only a little fellow and $50, it involves justice. That's what is important.

I always turn to the sports section first. The sports section records people's accomplishments; the front page nothing but man's failures.

We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.

Liberty, not communism, is the most contagious force in the world.

If it is a mistake of the head and not the heart don't worry about it, that's the way we learn.