POTTER STEWART

The 4th Amendment and the personal rights it secures have a long history. At the very core stands the right of a man to retreat into his own home and there be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion.

A person's mere propinquity to others independently suspected of criminal activity does not give rise to probable cause to search that person.

Swift justice demands more than just swiftness.

In fact, a fundamental interdependence exists between the personal right to liberty and the personal right to property.

Fairness is what justice really is.

It must always be remembered that what the Constitution forbids is not all searches and seizures, but unreasonable searches and seizures.

Abortion is inherently different from other medical procedures because no other procedure involves the purposeful termination of a potential life.

The dichotomy between personal liberties and property rights is a false one. Property does not have rights. People have rights.

Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself.

Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do.

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material but I know it when I see it.

To force a lawyer on a defendant can only lead him to believe that the law contrives against him.

The Constitution nowhere mentions a specific right of personal choice in matters of marriage and family life, but the ‘liberty’ protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment covers more than those freedoms explicitly named in the Bill of Rights

We recognized ‘the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.’ That right necessarily includes the right of a woman to decide whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.

In a Constitution for a free people, there can be no doubt that the meaning of ‘liberty’ must be broad indeed.

The death penalty is as random as being struck by lightning.

Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.

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.

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

So far as the Constitution goes .. the press is free to do battle against secrecy and deception in government. But the press cannot expect from the Constitution that they will succeed…. The Constitution itself is neither a Freedom of Information Act or an Official Secrets Act.

The right to defy an unconstitutional statute is basic ….

For the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection. But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.

May the state fence in the harmless mentally ill solely to save its citizens from exposure to those whose ways are different? One might as well ask if the state, to avoid public unease, could incarcerate all who are physically unattractive or socially eccentric.

I think that the Court's task, in this as in all areas of constitutional adjudication, is not responsibly aided by the uncritical invocation of metaphors like the ' wall of separation,' a phrase nowhere to be found in the Constitution.

We dedicated ourselves to a powerful idea - organic law rather than naked power. There seems to be universal acceptance of that idea in the nation.