List of Harry A. Blackmun Quotes

From This Day Forward, I No Longer Shall Tinker With The Machinery Of Death.

By Placing Discretion In The Hands Of An Official To Grant Or Deny A License, Such A Statute Creates A Threat Of Censorship That By Its Very Existence Chills Free Speech.

This Court Repeatedly Has Recognized That The Whole Subject Of The Domestic Relations Of Husband And Wife Belongs To The Laws Of The States And Not To The Laws Of The United States.

We're All Eccentrics. We're Nine Prima Donnas.

The Flaw In The Statute Is That In All Its Applications, It Operates On A Fundamentally Mistaken Premise That High Solicitation Costs Are An Accurate Measure Of Fraud.

The Death Penalty Experiment Has Failed.

Of One Thing, However, I Am Certain. Just As An Execution Without Adequate Safeguards Is Unacceptable, So Too Is An Execution When The Condemned Prisoner Can Prove That He Is Innocent. The Execution Of A Person Who Can Show That He Is Innocent Comes Perilously Close To Simple Murder.

The Right Of An Individual To Conduct Intimate Relationships In The Intimacy Of His Or Her Own Home Seems To Me To Be The Heart Of The Constitutions Protection Of Privacy.

What The Court Really Has Refused To Recognize Is The Fundamental Interest All Individuals Have In Controlling The Nature Of Their Intimate Associations.

The Mandated Description Of Fetal Characteristics At Two-week Intervals, No Matter How Objective, Is Plainly Overinclusive. [it Is] Not Medical Information That Is Always Relevant To The Woman's Decision, And It May Serve To Confuse And Punish Her And To Heighten Her Anxiety.

I Am More Optimistic Though, That This Court Will Eventually Conclude That The Effort To Eliminate Arbitrariness While Preserving Fairness In The Infliction Of [death] Is So Plainly Doomed To Failure That Is - And The Death Penalty - Must Be Abandoned Altogether. I May Not Live To See That Day, But I Have Faith That Eventually It Will Arrive.

From This Day Forward, I No Longer Shall Tinker With The Machinery Of Death. ... I Fell Morally And Intellectually Obligated Simply To Concede That The Death Penalty Experiment Has Failed.