Anthony Kennedy Quotes
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The Constitution doesn't belong to a bunch of judges and lawyers. It belongs to you.
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Sometimes you don't know if you're Caesar about to cross the Rubicon or Captain Queeg cutting your own tow line.
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Our system presumes that there are certain principles that are more important than the temper of the times. And you must have a judge who is detached, who is independent, who is fair, who is committed only to those principles, and not public pressures of other sort.
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Indeed I do and I admire it. I am a practicing Catholic.
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Some kinds of government regulation of private consensual homosexual behavior may face substantial constitutional challenge.
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First Amendment freedoms are most in danger when the government seeks to control thought or to justify its laws for that impermissible end. The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought.
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In the federal confirmation process, a standard question from the judiciary committee is, 'Well, if you're confirmed will you legislate?' And, with a look of horror, the nominee says, 'Oh, I won't legislate.' Well, what about the law of contract and tort; where do they think it came from, the stork?
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Dignitary wounds cannot always be healed with the stroke of a pen.
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The remedy for speech that is false is speech that is true. This is the ordinary course in a free society. The response to the unreasoned is the rational; to the uninformed, the enlightened; to the straight-out lie, the simple truth.
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It is proper that we acknowledge the overwhelming weight of international opinion against the juvenile death penalty.
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The fetus, in many cases, dies just as a human adult or child would: It bleeds to death as it is torn from limb from limb. The fetus can be alive at the beginning of the dismemberment process and can survive for a time while its limbs are being torn off.
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This Court now concludes that independent political expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.
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The instant case involves liberty of the person both in its spatial and more transcendent dimensions.... Bowers was not correct when it was decided, and it is not correct today.... As the Constitution endures, persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom.
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We must never lose sight of the fact that the law has a moral foundation, and we must never fail to ask ourselves not only what the law is, but what the law should be.
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When Government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought. This is unlawful. The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves.
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When a juvenile offender commits a heinous crime, the State can exact forfeiture of some of the most basic liberties, but the State cannot extinguish his life and his potential to attain a mature understanding of his own humanity.
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The First Amendment is often inconvenient. But that is beside the point. Inconvenience does not absolve the government of its obligation to tolerate speech.