David H. Souter

“The day you see a camera coming into our courtroom, it's going to roll over my dead body.”

“I was the stealth nominee.”

“In a free society, we are bound to have disagreements.”

“The Court is not a political institution, and it is not its function to fashion the law according to its own good sense.”

“The first duty of a human being is to assume the right functional relationship to society — more briefly, to find your real job, and do it.”

“Unless we know our own history, we will simply be victims of it.”

“The great problem for the Twenty-First Century is that we have a Nineteenth Century constitution.”

“The state of our civic education is not just a shame; it is a threat to our democracy.”

“An ignorant people can never be a free people.”

“The one thing that I know is that you have to be very careful about what you think you know.”

“My own personal preference is for a private life.”

“What I worry about is that people will gradually lose their capacity to understand the arguments in favor of liberty.”

“What is the price of principle?”