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Anthony Kennedy Quotes
born 1936 United States
Anthony McLeod Kennedy (born 23 July 1936) is an American lawyer and judge who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was nominated by President Ronald Reagan on November 11, 1987, and took the oath of office on February 18, 1988.
Also known as: Kennedy, Anthony
Random Anthony Kennedy quote
28 quotes
The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times.
Dignitary wounds cannot always be healed with the stroke of a pen.
Only a weak society needs government protection or intervention before it pursues its resolve to preserve the truth. Truth needs neither handcuffs nor a badge for its vindication.
At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State.
As the Constitution endures, persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom.
The First Amendment is often inconvenient. But that is beside the point. Inconvenience does not absolve the government of its obligation to tolerate speech.
A law imposing criminal penalties on protected speech is a stark example of speech suppression.
First Amendment freedoms are most in danger when the government seeks to control thought or to justify its laws for that impermissible end. The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought.
It is proper that we acknowledge the overwhelming weight of international opinion against the juvenile death penalty.
The essence of democracy is that the right to make law rests in the people and flows to the government, not the other way around. Freedom resides first in the people without need of a grant from government.
The Government may not suppress lawful speech as the means to suppress unlawful speech.
The fetus, in many cases, dies just as a human adult or child would: It bleeds to death as it is torn from limb from limb. The fetus can be alive at the beginning of the dismemberment process and can survive for a time while its limbs are being torn off.
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 Constitution doesn't belong to a bunch of judges and lawyers. It belongs to you.
Inconvenience does not absolve the government of its obligation to tolerate speech.
Some kinds of government regulation of private consensual homosexual behavior may face substantial constitutional challenge.
Times can blind us to certain truths.
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.
Sometimes you don't know if you're Caesar about to cross the Rubicon or Captain Queeg cutting your own tow line.
[T]his Court now concludes that independent [political] expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.
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