The risk of racial prejudice infecting a capital sentencing proceeding is especially serious in light of the complete finality of the death sentence.

A right to jury trial is granted to criminal defendants in order to prevent oppression by the Government.

The law is constantly based on notions of morality, and if all laws representing essentially moral choices are to be invalidated under the due process clause, the courts will be very busy indeed.

We're the only branch of government that explains itself in writing every time itmakes a decision.

The 1st Amendment protects the right to speak, not the right to spend.

The Court is most vulnerable and comes nearest to illegitimacy when it deals with judge-made constitutional law having little or no cognizable roots in the language or design of the Constitution.

Where the suspect poses no immediate threat to the officer and no threat to others, the harm resulting from the failing to apprehend him does not justify the use of deadly force to do so.

While the collateral consequences of drugs such as cocaine are indisputably severe, they are not unlike those which flow from the misuse of other, legal, substances.

The role of the judge is simply to decide cases.

Respondent would have us announce a fundamental right to engage in homosexual sodomy. This we are quite unwilling to do.

Act and God will act.

It is difficult to admonish Frenchmen. Their habit of mind is unfavorable to preachment.

We are born with two incurable diseases, life, from which we die, and hope, which says maybe death isn't the end.

I'm not a great beauty. That's not me.

I had a story-telling mother; she's written novels and short stories. So I feel like maybe I'm staying alive by telling tales.

Money, money, all is money! Could you write even a penny novelette without money to put heart in you?

You've got to be a good date for the reader.

Life is like college; may I graduate and earn some honors.

I have tremendous faith in theuniverse. I feel at home on this planet. Even though it's a very big world out there, I plan on walking right through the middle of it unharmed.

Profits are the lifeblood of the economic system, the magic elixir upon which progress and all good things depend ultimately. But one man's lifeblood is another man's cancer.