Ted Olson Quotations

Another argument, vaguer and even less persuasive, is that gay marriage somehow does harm to heterosexual marriage. I have yet to meet anyone who can explain to me what this means. In what way would allowing same-sex partners to marry diminish the marriages of heterosexual couples?

You have to take strength from the people that love you and the people that love Barbara and the huge number of expressions of sympathy and compassion and support. That has been extremely moving.

The United States Supreme Court has repeatedly held that marriage is one of the most fundamental rights that we have as Americans under our Constitution.

The very idea of marriage is basic to recognition as equals in our society; any status short of that is inferior, unjust, and unconstitutional.

She said it had been hijacked shortly after takeoff. By this time, the plane had been in the air - again, I'm presuming that it took off on time - for over an hour.

The plane took off at 8:10 in the morning - or that's when it was scheduled to take off. And that's when I believe it took off. I had been in my office at the Department of Justice. Someone told me that there had been the two strikes that occurred at the World Trade Center.

I immediately called the command center of the Department of Justice to let them know that my wife was on a plane that had been hijacked. I mainly wanted them know there was another hijacked plane out there.

I wanted it not to be true. I wanted it not to be her plane. I wanted it - I wanted, if it was her plane, to have somehow survived because she was in the back of the airplane. But we know that doesn't happen, not with those sorts of things.

My wife had taken off on a plane. Two airplanes had crashed into the World Trade Center. I, of course, like any other person, felt potentially devastated, panicky a little bit.

The calls that I have received from President Bush and Vice President Cheney, the fact that there are other people that are suffering every bit as much as I am, and that our whole nation is going through a tragedy together, I think we have to think about those things.

Well, she managed to - Barbara was capable of doing practically anything if she set her mind to it. In retrospect, I'm not surprised that Barbara managed to get collect calls through.

She wasn't crying, she didn't even sound frightened. She told me her plane was hijacked and that they didn't know she was making a phone call.

Similar legitimate law enforcement tactics are crucial in violent crime, terrorism and other contexts,

We're all concerned about it, and we're all sensitive to it, ... We do what we can to protect people's lives, but we protect their liberties at the same time.

Barbara would have insisted that I live my life and that I go on and do the best possible job I could as solicitor general of the United States.

This matter pertains to information that is required to be kept under seal.

I want to add that the people that are conducting this war against the United States and the citizens of the United States wear no uniforms, swearing allegiance to no country, obey no treaties and have sworn and acknowledged that what they want to do is do the most amount of damage to the most amount of individuals without regard to any rules,

So Barbara wanted to be where things were happening, wanted to have opinions, wanted to express them, and wanted to live every moment of her life.

In its (earlier) brief to the court of appeals,

No one aspires as a child to grow up and enter into a domestic partnership. But they do aspire as children to grow up and be married.

It happens every once in awhile at the federal level when the solicitor general, on behalf of the U.S., will confess error or decline to defend a law. I don't know what is going through the [Obama] administration's thought process on 'don't ask, don't tell.' It would be appropriate for them to say 'the law has been deemed unconstitutional, we are not going to seek further review of that.'

Would you like Fox's right to free press put up to a vote and say: "Well, if five states have approved it, let's wait till the other 45 states do."?

The reality is that our independent judiciary is the most respected branch of our government and the envy of the world.

The very idea of marriage is basic to recognition as equals in our society any status short of that is inferior, unjust, and unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court has said that: Marriage is the most important relation in life. Now that's being withheld from the plaintiffs. It is the foundation of society. It is essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness. It's a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights and older than our political parties. One of the liberties protected by the Due Process Clause. A right of intimacy to the degree of being sacred. And a liberty right equally available to a person in a homosexual relationship as to heterosexual persons.

It's easy to imagine an infinite number of situations where the government might legitimately give out false information,

These individuals are tyrants, and so they hate democracy. They are bigots, zealots, and persecutors, and so they hate Americas freedom tolerance, and respect for all people. The terrorists of Sept. 11 live and flourish in darkness. They cannot survive in the liberating and inspirational sunlight of American freedom and democracy.

I guess the language that Justice Ginsburg used at the closing of the VMI (United States v. Virginia Military Institute) case is an important thing; it resonates with me: 'A prime part of the history of our Constitution is the story of the extension of constitutional rights to people once ignored or excluded.'

The manual recount processes in Florida are unfair and inconsistent. They treat equal people in different ways. It's unconstitutional.