Harry A. Blackmun Quotes

I have fervently been on both sides of that question at different times.

We live in a bewildering world.

The most savage controversies are about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.

Discussion in America means dissent.

I am used to controversies.

Disagreement is something normal.

One is and is not in the centre of the maelstrom of it all.

I look for ambiguity when I'm writing because life is ambiguous.

The world's a mean place. It's unfair, then it's fair. It's hateful, then it's loving. It's a very peculiar place on philosophical and metaphysical and religious levels.

Controversy is only dreaded by the advocates of error.

How long halt ye between two opinions?

I disagree that I'm on the wrong side. I'm just not on your side.

… new truths are often struck out by the collision of parties, in the eagerness of controversy, which otherwise would have lain hid, The divine disapprobation of a form of government by kings, I take to be one of this sort of truths.

Many a long dispute among divines [theologians] may be thus abridged: It is so; It is not so. It is so; it is not so.

The best ideas make you want to say 'yes' and 'no' in the same breath.

I hate consensus. I like confrontation.

The unknowable creates the greatest controversies.

I think there is no one answer. It is still a struggle, there are tensions and I'm sure there are many people who would like to see these questions laid to rest or cease to be posed altogether.

The world is full of contradiction.

Life is everything and nothing all at once.

But doing what I do, you will never get unanimity of people.

Being ambivalent doesn't mean that you're a relevatist, that anything goes; it just means that you show the complexity of life. Life is always complex.

Light is meaningful only in relation to darkness, and truth presupposes error. It is these mingled opposites which people our life, which make it pungent, intoxicating. We only exist in terms of this conflict, in the zone where black and white clash.

There's nothing more ironic or contradictory than life itself.

Some matters are simply contentious. Sometimes you're never going to get it right.