Justice Brennan Quotes & Sayings

All ideas having even the slightest redeeming social importance - unorthodox ideas, controversial ideas, even ideas hateful to the prevailing climate of opinion, have the full protection of the guarantees [of the First Amendment]. — William J. Brennan

For the Christian one dislocating, self-impoverishing hour spent with a child living in a broken-down dump is worth more than all the burial mounds of rhetoric, all the enfeebled good intentions, all the mumbling and fumbling and tardiness of those Christians who are so busy cultivating their own holiness that they cannot hear the anguished cry of the child in the slum. — Brennan Manning

If I wasn't going to be a world-famous journalist and if I didn't have such respect for truth and justice, I could be an amazing master criminal. — Sarah Rees Brennan

Consequences flow from a justice's interpretation in a direct and immediate way. A judicial decision respecting the incompatibility of Jim Crow with a constitutional guarantee of equality is not simply a contemplative exercise in defining the shape of a just society. It is an order — William J. Brennan

Justice William Brennan stated that the phrase 'under God' in our Pledge of Allegiance is constitutional because it no longer has a religious purpose or meaning. — Mathew Staver

Don't be silly," she said. "I don't want us to chase people with scissors. And I don't want us to bite them. That's assault. All I want to do is steal their stuff."
There was a pause.
"Comparatively, its legal," Kami said defensively.
"Stealing in the name of justice is okay," Jared put in. "We'd be like Robin Hood. Steal from the rich, punch them in the face. I'm pretty sure that's how the saying goes. — Sarah Rees Brennan

Anchor babies are "citizens" only because of a phony constitutional principle cooked up by Justice William Brennan in 1982. Just like abortion, sodomy, gay marriage, and unicorns - it's in the Constitution! — Ann Coulter

If you're into social justice it's hard not to be on black people's side. — Neal Brennan

Our Founding Fathers were the first to articulate the reasons for their First Amendment, the same reasons given by Learned Hand, and by Justice Brennan in New York Times v. Sullivan . It is a lesson we keep forgetting and must relearn in each succeeding generation. — Gilbert S. Merritt Jr.