Anthony Kennedy

“The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own time.”

“No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than they once were.”

“Sometimes it is easy... to enhance your prestige by not exercising your responsibility, but that's not been the tradition of the court.”

“The fascination about being a judge is the same about the duty of being a judge, and that is to ask yourself, Why am I about to rule the way I am about to rule? You must always ask yourself that question.”

“Our system presumes that there are certain principles that are more important than the temper of the times. And you must have a judge who is detached, who is independent, who is fair, who is committed only to those principles and not public pressures of other sort. That's the meaning of neutrality.”

“No one questions the validity, the urgency, the essentiality of the Voting Rights Act.”

“We hold that same sex couples may exercise the fundamental right to marry in all states.”

“You have plaintiffs attorneys, you have defense attorneys. So there is no unified bar that will protect a particular judge who has made a courageous decision that's unpopular.”

“In the political context fair means somebody that will vote for the unions or for the business. It can't mean that in the judicial context or we're in real trouble.”

“A commitment to the Constitution is not something that's genetic. It's not inherited. It's not automatic. It has to be taught. And each generation must learn about the Constitution and the values of constitutional institutions within the context of their own time, within the environment of their own time.”

“We must never lose sight of the fact that the law has a moral foundation, and we must never fail to ask ourselves not only what the law is, but what the law should be.”

“The First Amendment is often inconvenient. But that is beside the point. Inconvenience does not absolve the government of its obligation to tolerate speech.”

“Civics isn't something where you learned - learn it for a couple weeks in high school; it is who we are. Americans defined themselves by their Constitution. That is what creates us. This is our heritage, and you must know our heritage.”

“Political speech is indispensable to decision-making in a democracy, and this is no less true because the speech comes from a corporation rather than an individual.”

“Asking questions is an essential part of police investigation. In the ordinary sense a police officer is free to ask a person for identification without implicating the Fourth Amendment.”

“As the Constitution endures, persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom.”

“The remedy for speech that is false is speech that is true. This is the ordinary course in a free society. The response to the unreasoned is the rational; to the uninformed, the enlightened; to the straight-out lie, the simple truth.”

“Democracy is something that you must learn each generation. It has to be taught.”

“'1984,' one of the most important works ever written, helped us understand the Cold War. In '1984,' the dictatorship was always surveilling you. Now, young people want to be surveyed. They want people to know where they are at all times.”

“A judge sometimes must release a criminal. He doesn't like it, she doesn't like it, but the law requires it. And the context of an election in which you are "soft on crime" betrays a misunderstanding of the judicial process and a misunderstanding of the Constitution.”