William O. Douglas Quotes
The critical point is that the Constitution places the right of silence beyond the reach of government.
Quotes to Explore
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I rise in support of the separation of powers as established by our Founding Fathers in the Constitution. The Constitution clearly delegates the power to deal with criminal matters, like the use of drugs, to the States.
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I had absolute freedom to create things on my own and in silence. No rush, the artificial rush by media. Certainly no rush to grow up. We had plenty of boyhood, plenty of girlhood.
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One of the worst of errors would be the general admission of the proposition that a Government has no right to interfere for any purpose except for that of affording protection.
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Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.
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Silence is also conversation.
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I wish the government would put a tax on pianos for the incompetent.
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Efficiency in government is a more elusive concept than efficiency in the private economy, which may be measured relatively easily as output per units of input. What is the government's 'output?'
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Silence is my dignity.
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We ought to be allowing the private sector to pursue every form of energy because the energy of the future, it's not going to come from the government picking winners and losers.
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A man is known by the silence he keeps.
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Most people seem unaware that corporate influence and wealth has taken over public policy, such that government policy now favors the wealthy few at the expense of the people.
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Holding our own government to account for the use of its power is, in my view, the highest mission of a U.S. news organization.
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Make the people sovereign and the poor will use the machinery of government to dispossess the rich.
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Government can wreck a business by confiscating its money by taxation.
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I think, if you create the right economic framework in terms of government policy, that Saskatchewan can continue to succeed and grow. Instead of having people migrate from Saskatchewan, they will be migrating to Saskatchewan.
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Government can do best by simply getting out of the way.
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We are a constitutional monarchy. I don't order laws, I propose them. Article 35 of our constitution states that the king can only refuse a law of parliament once, then he has to sign it - if the same law is then supported by a two-thirds majority in both houses of parliament.
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Where in the Constitution does it say that because we don't like a foreign country's leader, we should go in and topple the dictator?
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In all the more advanced communities the great majority of things are worse done by the intervention of government than the individuals most interested in the matter would do them, or cause them to be done, if left to themselves.
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The years of imprisonment hardened me ... Perhaps if you have been given a moment to hold back and wait for the next blow, your emotions wouldn't be blunted as they have been in my case. When it happens every day of your life, when that pain becomes a way of life ... there is no longer anything I can fear. There is nothing the government has not done to me. There isn't any pain I haven't known.
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What WE represent is the nexus of concrescent novelty that has been moving itself together, complexifying itself, folding itself in upon itself for billions and billions of years. There is, so far as we know, nothing more advanced than what is sitting behind your eyes. The human neocortex is the most densely ramified complexified structure in the known universe.
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Time,--the most independent of all things.
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I don't just train to be a participant. I train to come up big in big moments. That's when I know I've got to roll the sleeves up.
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The critical point is that the Constitution places the right of silence beyond the reach of government.
