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Potter Stewart quotes
Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.
Potter Stewart
I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [hard-core pornography]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.
Potter Stewart
Several decisions of this Court make clear that freedom of personal choice in matters of marriage and family life is one of the liberties protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.... That right necessarily includes the right of a woman to decide whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.
Potter Stewart
I think that the court has misapplied a great constitutional principle. I cannot see how 'official religion' is established by letting those who want to say a prayer say it. On the contrary, I think that to deny the wish of these school children to join in reciting this prayer is to deny them the opportunity of sharing in the spiritual heritage of the nation.
Potter Stewart
Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do.
Potter Stewart
Abortion is inherently different from other medical procedures because no other procedure involves the purposeful termination of a potential life.
Potter Stewart
Fairness is what justice really is.
Potter Stewart
It must always be remembered that what the Constitution forbids is not all searches and seizures, but unreasonable searches and seizures.
Potter Stewart
The Executive must have the largely unshared duty to determine and preserve the degree of internal security necessary to exercise that power successfully. It is an awesome responsibility requiring judgment and wisdom of a high order. A very first principle of that wisdom would be an insistence upon avoiding secrecy for its own sake. For when everything is classified, then nothing is classified and the system becomes one to be disregarded by the cynical or the careless and to be manipulated by those intent on self-protection or self-promotion.
Potter Stewart
In the absence of the governmental checks and balances.
Potter Stewart
I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material but I know it when I see it.
Potter Stewart
Swift justice demands more than just swiftness.
Potter Stewart
To force a lawyer on a defendant can only lead him to believe that the law contrives against him.
Potter Stewart
The dichotomy between personal liberties and property rights is a false one. Property does not have rights. People have rights.
Potter Stewart
In fact, a fundamental interdependence exists between the personal right to liberty and the personal right to property.
Potter Stewart
A person's mere propinquity to others independently suspected of criminal activity does not give rise to probable cause to search that person.
Potter Stewart