Potter Stewart Quotes

I say that the responsibility of the judiciary is to uphold the Constitution, not rewrite it.

When it comes to our Constitution, judges perform, certainly, an important role. But the people, acting through their elected representatives, should play an even more important role.

The 1947 Court (Everson v. Board of Education) for the first time had used only Jefferson's metaphor - completely divorced from its context and intent.

The current version of... separation of church and state says you can be salt, and you can be light, but only inside the four walls of the church.

There is no separation of church and state. Modern US Supreme Courts have raped the Constitution and raped the Christian faith and raped the churches by misinterpreting what the Founders had in mind in the First Amendment to the Constitution.

Our laws and our institutions must necessarily be based upon and embody the teachings of the Redeemer of mankind. It is impossible that it should be otherwise, and in this sense and to this extent our civilization and our institutions are emphatically Christian.

Whether it is in the United States or in mainland Europe, written constitutions have one great weakness. That is that they contain the potential to have judges take decisions which should properly be made by democratically elected politicians.

Through its interpretation of the Constitution, the Supreme Court hugely shapes the fabric of our society for us and for future generations.

The Constitution does not require complete separation of church and state; it affirmatively mandates accommodation, not merely tolerance, of all religions, and forbids hostility toward any.

I consider the government of the U.S. as interdicted by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises.

It may seem ironic that the judicial branch preserves its legitimacy through refraining from action on political questions. That concept was put forward best by Justice [Felix] Frankfurter, appointed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The "wall of separation between church and State" is a metaphor based on bad history.

When justices seize authority from the other branches of the federal government, as well as state and local governments, under the rubric of judicial review, that’s tyranny.

In the case Stone v. Graham, the Supreme Court ruled that - under 'separation of church and state' - it was unconstitutional for a student in school to even see a copy of the Ten Commandments.

The history of our nation is intertwined with a certain religious tradition, and that the First Amendment was not intended to result in the complete exclusion of religious beliefs from our public classrooms.

It is surely only a matter of time before some federal judge finds the Constitution unconstitutional.

Since the Court took God our of our schools, we've gotten exactly what we should expect: godless schools.

This shift from the Judeo-Christian basis for law and the shift away from the restraints of the Constitution automatically militates against religious liberty.

Constitutional interpretation is not the business of the Court only, but also properly the business of all branches of government.

On the issues of religious liberty, the Supreme Court continues to scrape against the bedrock of the American spirit.

If it be said that the legislative body are themselves the constitutional judges of their own powers, and that the construction they put upon them is conclusive upon the other departments, it may be answered, that this cannot be the natural presumption, where it is not be collected from any particular provisions in the Constitution.

Invalidating laws has absolutely nothing to do with judicial activism. It depends on whether the law is unconstitutional or not. That's really the key point.

Under the First Amendment's prohibition of the establishment of religion, the Court has steadily made religion a matter for the private individual by driving it out of the public arena.

The Court abandoned the traditional constitutional meaning of 'religion' as a single denomination or system of worship and instead substituted a new 'modern' concept which even now remains vague and nebulous, having changed several times in recent years.

I'm concerned about the role the court will play in protecting individual rights in this and the next century.