William Rehnquist Quotes

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.

The justices were not appointed to roam at large in the realm of public policy and strike down laws that offend their own ideas of what is desirable and what is undesirable.

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.

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.

All of these factors are subsumed to a greater or lesser extent by observing that 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. The well-known checks and balances provided by the framers of the Constitution have supplied the necessary centrifugal force to make the Court independent of Congress and the president.

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

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.

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].

The framers reconciled in a somewhat rough-hewn way the need for an antimajoritarian institution such as the Supreme Court to interpret a written constitution within a broader system of government basically committed to majority rule.

To the extent that libraries wish to offer unfiltered access, they are free to do so without federal assistance.

Every judge who has sat on a case involving a constitutional claim must have surely experienced the feeling that the particular law being challenged was either unjust or silly or vindictive. It is unfortunately all too easy to translate these visceral reactions into a determination to find some way to hold the law unconstitutional.

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.

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.

A judge's disposition should be about evenly balanced between sail and anchor. He cannot be anchored to the past mechanically, but he ought not be moved by every puff of novel doctrine.

The distinction between a government with limited and unlimited powers is abolished, if those limits do not confine the persons on whom they are imposed, and if acts prohibited and acts allowed, are of equal obligation. It is a proposition too plain to be contested, that the constitution controls any legislative act repugnant to it; or, that the legislature may alter the constitution by an ordinary act. Between these alternatives there is no middle ground. The constitution is either a superior paramount law, unchangeable by ordinary means, or it is on a level with ordinary legislative acts, and, like other acts, is alterable when the legislature shall please to alter it. If the former part of the alternative be true, then a legislative act contrary to the constitution is not law: if the latter part be true, then written constitutions are absurd attempts, on the part of the people, to limit a power in its own nature illimitable.