WILLIAM J. BRENNAN JR.

Sex, a great and mysterious motive force in human life, has indisputably been a subject of absorbing interest to mankind through the ages.

Death is not only an unusually severe punishment, unusual in its pain, in its finality and in its enormity, but is serves no penal purpose more effectively than a less severe punishment.

There are no menial jobs, only menial attitudes.

We look to the history of the time of framing and to the intervening history of interpretation. But the ultimate question must be, what do the words of the text mean in our time.

If the right to privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion.

Congress acknowledged that society's accumulated myths and fears about disability and disease are as handicapping as are the physical limitations that flow from actual impairment.

Appellant constituted a legitimate class of one, and this provides a basis for Congress's decision to proceed with dispatch with respect to his materials.

The principle inherent in the clause that prohibits pointless infliction of excessive punishment when less severe punishment can adequately achieve the same purposes invalidates the punishment.

No longer is the female destined solely for the home and the rearing of the family and only the male for the marketplace and the world of ideas.

We current justices read the Constitution in the only way that we can: as 20th-century Americans.

Religious conflict can be the bloodiest and cruelest conflicts that turn people into fanatics.

The quest for freedom, dignity, and the rights of man will never end.

Use of a mentally ill person's involuntary confession is antithetical to the notion of fundamental fairness embodied in the due process clause.

Sex and obscenity are not synonymous. Obscene material is material which deals with sex in a manner appealing to prurient interest.

Recognition of the principle ‘one man, one vote’ as a constitutional one redeems the promise of self-governance by affirming the essential dignity of every citizen to equal participation in the democratic process.

The Constitution was framed fundamentally as a bulwark against governmental power.

Preventing the arbitrary administration of punishment is a basic ideal of any society that purports to be governed by the rule of law.

[E]rroneous statement … must be protected if the freedoms of expression are to be given the breathing space that they need ... to survive.

An investigation in which the processes of law-making and law-evaluating are submerged entirely in exposure of individual behavior—in adjudication, of a sort, through the exposure process—is outside the constitutional pale of congressional inquiry.

It is arrogant to pretend that ... we can gauge accurately the intent of the Framers [of the Constitution] on application of principle to specific, contemporary questions.

Law cannot stand apart from the social changes around it.

Sex and obscenity are not synonymous.

The American system of criminal prosecution is accusatorial, not inquisitional, and the 5th Amendment is its essential mainstay.

The genius of the Constitution rests not in any static meaning it might have had in a world that is dead and gone, but in the adaptability of its great principles to cope with current problems and current needs.

The government may not prohibit expression simply because it disagrees with its message.