Stephen Breyer Quotes

The Constitution doesn’t say that whites alone shall have our basic rights.., but that we shall all have them

Most of the rights that you enjoy go way beyond the Constitution.

The notion that a person's constitutional rights may be subject to a majority vote is itself anathema.

No doubt that a great deal of nonsense has been written about the “unalienable rights of individuals.”

The rights to life, liberty and property were not meant to be subject to the vagaries of majority rule.

We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal …

One great object of the Constitution was to restrain majorities from oppressing minorities or encroaching upon their just rights.

Democracies have been, and governments called, free; but the spirit of independence and the consciousness of unalienable rights, were never before transfused into the minds of a whole people....The feeling of equality which they proudly cherish does not proceed from an ignorance of their station, but from the knowledge of their rights; and it is this knowledge which will render it so exceedingly difficult for any tyrant ever to triumph over the liberties of our country.

It’s very basic in the Bill of Rights, he says. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, whether the majority agrees with them or not. Rights are in some sense anti-democratic; to trumpet democracy as the all-important value is to denigrate them.”

The prohibitions of the Constitution were put in place precisely to prevent majority opinion from ruling certain areas of life.

Any delay in action protecting constitutional rights is justice denied.

Rights that depend on the sufferance of the State are of uncertain tenure.

All government and all private institutions must be designed to promote and protect and defend the integrity and the dignity of the individual. And that is the essential meaning of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

If by the mere force of numbers a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might in a moral point of view, justify revolution—certainly would if such a right were a vital one.

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

The Constitution is itself in every rational sense, and to every useful purpose, A BILL OF RIGHTS.

Our rights to live and to love each other, those rights are greater than any other right in the Constitution, period.

All men are created equal.

Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority.

Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere.

I think the Supreme Court does have the authority, which is not used, to declare a blanket right for all people, all adults.

The Constitution has a good share of deliberately open-ended guarantees, like rights to due process of law, equal protection of the law, and freedom from unreasonable searches.

Wherever there is a human being, I see God-given rights inherent in that being, whatever may be the sex or complexion.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.

A privilege may not be a right, but, under the constitution of the country, I do not gather that any broad distinction is drawn between the rights and the privileges that were enjoyed and that were taken away.