Warren E. Burger Quotes

To hold that the act of homosexual sodomy is somehow protected as a fundamental right would be to cast aside millennia of moral teaching.

The notion that most people want black-robed judges, well-dressed lawyers and fine-paneled courtrooms as the setting to resolve their disputes is not correct. People with problems, like people with pains, want relief, and they want it as quickly and inexpensively as possible.

We are more casual about qualifying the people we allow to act as advocates in the courtroom than we are about licensing electricians.

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.

There are many prices we pay for freedoms secured by the First Amendment; the risk of undue influence is one of them, confirming what we have long known: Freedom is hazardous, but some restraints are worse.

The policeman on the beat or in the patrol car makes more decisions and exercises broader discretion affecting the daily lives of people every day and to a greater extent, in many respects, than a judge will ordinarily exercise in a week.

The right of every person "to be let alone" must be placed in the scales with the right of others to communicate.

Concepts of justice must have hands and feet...to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. This is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.

There can be no assumption that today's majority is "right" and the Amish or others like them are "wrong." A way of life that is odd or even erratic but interferes with no right or interests of others is not to be condemned because it is different.

It is not unprofessional to give free legal advice, but advertising that the first visit will be free is a bit like a fox telling chickens he will not bite them until they cross the threshold of the hen house.

Doctors still retain a high degree of public confidence because they are perceived as healers. Should lawyers not be healers? Healers, not warriors? Healers, not procurers? Healers, not hired guns?

We may be well on our way to a society overrun by hordes of lawyers, hungry as locusts, and brigades of judges in numbers never before contemplated.

The men who wrote the First Amendment religion clause did not view paid legislative chaplains and opening prayers as a violation of that amendment... the practice of opening sessions with prayer has continued without interruption ever since that early session of Congress. It can hardly be thought that in the same week the members of the first Congress voted to appoint and pay a chaplain for each House and also voted to approve the draft of the First Amendment... (that) they intended to forbid what they had just declared acceptable.

The trial of a case is a three-legged stool - a judge and two advocates.

Calculated risks of abuse are taken in order to preserve higher values.

There may be some incorrigible human beings who cannot be changed except by God's own mercy to that one person.

History is filled with examples of men and women who rendered highly effective performance without the conventional badges of accomplishment in terms of certificates, diplomas, or degrees. Diplomas and tests are useful servants, but Congress has mandated the commonsense proposition that they are not to become masters of reality.

Crime and the fear of crime have permeated the fabric of American life.

Guilt or innocence becomes irrelevant in the criminal trials as we flounder in a morass of artificial rules poorly conceived and often impossible [to apply].

Trials by the adversarial contest must in time go the way of the ancient trial by battle and blood.

The State may justify a limitation on religious liberty by showing it is essential to accomplish an overriding governmental interest.

A far greater factor than abolishing poverty is the deterrent effect of swift and certain consequences: swift arrest, prompt trial, certain penalty and - at some point - finality of judgment.

There can be no doubt that the practice of opening legislative sessions with prayer has become part of the fabric of our society.

[I]n constitutional adjudication some steps, which when taken were thought to approach 'the verge,' have become the platform for yet further steps. A certain momentum develops in constitutional theory and it can be a 'downhill thrust' easily set in motion but difficult to retard or stop.

It is indeed an odd business that it has taken this Court nearly two centuries to discover a constitutional mandate to have counsel at a preliminary hearing.