Anthony Kennedy Quotes

The history of the application of laws designed to suppress the obscene demonstrates convincingly that the power of government can be invoked under them against great art or literature, scientific treatises, or works exciting social controversy. Mistakes of the past prove that there is a strong countervailing interest to be considered in the freedoms guaranteed by the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of people.

The Democratic Party will never desert the freedoms of our people under the guise of pretending to protect them.

Americans cherish our liberty and don't want government or corporations to take away our freedoms.

All government, of course, is against liberty.

I don't think I should tell you what to do, nor should the government. As long as you enjoy your own personal liberties and don't infringe on the liberties of others, I don't care.

I don't like the idea that the government has so much of a say in things.

I find it very offensive when the government tells me what I can and cannot watch. Censor yourself.

I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans ...

If the 1st Amendment means anything, it means that the state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch.

It doesn’t keep us safe and it doesn’t keep us free if we give up our liberties to the government.

There is no "slippery slope" toward loss of liberty, only a long staircase where each step down must first be tolerated by the American people and their leaders.

We encounter the dilemma of freedom versus authority in all sorts of places but probably nowhere more frequently than in the area of Big Brother's ongoing efforts to protect us from ourselves – efforts that many people view as an invasion of their privacy or as infringement upon their God-given right to be stupid (though they don't usually put it that way).

If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a State has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch. Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds.

I don't think that it's up to government to dictate what people should wear.

It really is this: you are either for liberty, you're for freedom, and you're for living how you want to live without infringing and impugning on anyone else's rights, or you want the state to deal with everything.

A Bill of Rights that means what the majority wants it to mean is worthless.

The so-called liberals of today have the very popular idea that freedom of speech, of thought, of the press, freedom of religion, freedom from imprisonment without trial-that all these freedoms can be preserved in the absence of what is called economic freedom. They do not realize that, in a system where there is no market, where the government directs everything, all those other freedoms are illusory, even if they are made into laws and written up in constitutions.

I understand that unless you have a government of laws, rather than a government of people, you cannot protect dissent. And I understand, as a woman who probably would have been burned in the marketplace for witchcraft only about 200 years ago, that I need the First Amendment more than anybody does. And that even if I am repelled by child pornography or Bob Guccione's productions, that I have to protect those things, because essentially it's in my self-interest to do so.

I am for the First Amendment from the first word to the last. I believe it means what it says.

Even if drugs are fully as destructive as they are usually claimed to be, it is morally wrong and demonstrably more destructive for government to deprive people of their unalienable, individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right to make an utter mess of their own lives. Since human beings are inclined to learn more from the mistakes they make, rather than from their triumphs, the right to fail, for individuals and groups alike, may be even more important than the right to succeed, and it must be fiercely protected at almost any cost.

The Second Amendment is in the Constitution to help citizens protect themselves from people like Senator Dianne Feinstein who would come along, and if they could determine what words you can and cannot say, where and where you can't say them. The Constitution is there to protect you from mayors like Mike Doomberg who wants to tell you how big your beverage can be.

The First Amendment provides the only kind of security system that can preserve a free government - one that leaves the way wide open for people to favor, discuss, advocate, or incite causes and doctrines however obnoxious and antagonistic such views may be to the rest of us.

If he wants to be an asshole, it's a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice.

There can be no freedom in art and literature where the government determines who shall create them.