The Constitution requires that Congress treat similarly situated persons similarly, not that it engage in gestures of superficial equality.

Somewhere out there, beyond the walls of the courthouse, run currents and tides of public opinion which lap at the courtroom door.

It is truly surprising that the state must assign a greater value to a mother's decision to cut off a potential human life by abortion than to a father's decision to let it mature into a live child.

The Constitution does not guarantee the right to acquire information at a public library without any risk of embarrassment.

But the greatest injury of the 'wall' notion is its mischievous diversion of judges from the actual intentions of the drafters of the Bill of Rights. . . . The "wall of separation between church and state" is a metaphor based on bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned.

A public library does not acquire Internet terminals in order to create a public forum for Web publishers to express themselves, any more than it collects books in order to provide a public forum for the authors of books to speak.

The Supreme Court is an institution far more dominated by centrifugal forces, pushing toward individuality and independence, than it is by centripetal forces pulling for hierarchical ordering and institutional unity.

Our judges will not continue to represent the diverse face of America if only the well-to-do or the mediocre are willing to become judges.