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First Amendment freedoms are most in danger when the government seeks to control thought or to justify its laws for that impermissible end. The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought.

Anthony Kennedy

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Anthony Kennedy
Age: 88
Born: 1936
Born: July 23
Associate Justice Of The Supreme Court Of The United States
Judge
Jurist
Lawyer
Politician
University Teacher
Sacramento
California
Anthony McLeod Kennedy
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Freedom
Justify
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Impermissible
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Beginning
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First
Control
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More quotes by Anthony Kennedy

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No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were.
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The lessons of the First Amendment are as urgent in the modern world as the 18th Century when it was written. One timeless lesson is that if citizens are subjected to state-sponsored religious exercises, the State disavows its own duty to guard and respect that sphere of inviolable conscience and belief which is the mark of a free people.
Anthony Kennedy
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A law imposing criminal penalties on protected speech is a stark example of speech suppression.
Anthony Kennedy
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As the Constitution endures, persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom.
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Some kinds of government regulation of private consensual homosexual behavior may face substantial constitutional challenge.
Anthony Kennedy
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The Government may not suppress lawful speech as the means to suppress unlawful speech.
Anthony Kennedy
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Any time you burn a cross in Virginia, it's a crime?
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At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.
Anthony Kennedy
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The Constitution doesn't belong to a bunch of judges and lawyers. It belongs to you.
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The court decided, based on its reading of our precedents, that the effects test of Lemon is violated whenever government action creates an identification of the state with a religion, or with religion in general, ...or when the effect of the governmental action is to endorse one religion over another, or to endorse religion in general.
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The fetus, in many cases, dies just as a human adult or child would: It bleeds to death as it is torn from limb from limb. The fetus can be alive at the beginning of the dismemberment process and can survive for a time while its limbs are being torn off.
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Sometimes you don't know if you're Caesar about to cross the Rubicon or Captain Queeg cutting your own tow line.
Anthony Kennedy
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It is proper that we acknowledge the overwhelming weight of international opinion against the juvenile death penalty.
Anthony Kennedy
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When a juvenile offender commits a heinous crime, the State can exact forfeiture of some of the most basic liberties, but the State cannot extinguish his life and his potential to attain a mature understanding of his own humanity.
Anthony Kennedy
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We must never lose sight of the fact that the law has a moral foundation, and we must never fail to ask ourselves not only what the law is, but what the law should be.
Anthony Kennedy
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The federal sentencing guidelines should be revised downward. By contrast to the guidelines, I can accept neither the necessity nor the wisdom of federal mandatory minimum sentences. In too many cases, mandatory minimum sentences are unwise and unjust.
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The remedy for speech that is false is speech that is true. This is the ordinary course in a free society. The response to the unreasoned is the rational to the uninformed, the enlightened to the straight-out lie, the simple truth.
Anthony Kennedy
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There's a time for debate and a time for consensus. There's a time for advocacy and time for first principles.
Anthony Kennedy
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Family members have a personal stake in honoring and mourning their dead and objecting to unwarranted public exploitation that, by intruding upon their own grief, tends to degrade the rites and respect they seek to accord to the deceased person who was once their own.
Anthony Kennedy
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Asking questions is an essential part of police investigation. In the ordinary sense a police officer is free to ask a person for identification without implicating the Fourth Amendment.
Anthony Kennedy