William O. Douglas Quotes
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The great and invigorating influences in American life have been the unorthodox: the people who challenge an existing institution or way of life, or say and do things that make people think.
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The First Amendment makes confidence in the common sense of our people and in the maturity of their judgement the great postulate of our democracy.
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The challenge to our liberties comes frequently not from those who consciously seek to destroy our system of government, but from men of goodwill - good men who allow their proper concerns to blind them to the fact that what they propose to accomplish involves an impairment of liberty.
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Why cannot we work at cooperative schemes and search for the common ground binding all mankind together?
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We recognize the force of the argument that the effects of war under modern conditions may be felt in the economy for years and years, and that if the war power can be used in days of peace to treat all the wounds which war inflicts on our society, it may not only swallow up all other powers of Congress but largely obliterate the Ninth and the Tenth Amendments as well.
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The purpose of the University of Washington cannot be to produce black lawyers for blacks, Polish lawyers for Poles, Jewish lawyers for Jews, Irish lawyers for Irish. It should be to produce good lawyers for Americans, and not to place First Amendment barriers against anyone.
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World federation is an ideal that will not die. More and more people are coming to realize that peace must be more than an interlude if we are to survive; that peace is a produce of law and order; that law is essential if the force of arms is not to rule the world.
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We are rapidly entering the age of no privacy, where everyone is open to surveillance at all times; where there are no secrets from government.
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I have the same confidence in the ability of our people to reject noxious literature as I have in their capacity to sort out the true from the false in theology, economics, or any other field.
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The Court's great power is its ability to educate, to provide moral leadership.
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Ideas are indeed the most dangerous weapons in the world. Our ideas of freedom are the most powerful political weapons man has ever forged.
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At the constitutional level where we work, 90 percent of any decision is emotional. The rational part of us supplies the reasons for supporting our predilections.
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The critical point is that the Constitution places the right of silence beyond the reach of government.
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But our society - unlike most in the world - presupposes that freedom and liberty are in a frame of reference that makes the individual, not government, the keeper of his tastes, beliefs, and ideas. That is the philosophy of the First Amendment; and it is this article of faith that sets us apart from most nations in the world.
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The First Amendment, however, does not say that in every and all respects there shall be a separation of Church and State. Rathe, it studiously defines the manner, the specific ways, in which there shall be no concert or union or dependency one on the other. That is the common sense of the matter. Otherwise the state and religion would be aliens to each other.
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Discovery is adventure. There is an eagerness, touched at times with tenseness, as man moves ahead into the unknown. Walking the wilderness is indeed like living. The horizon drops away, bringing new sights, sounds, and smells from the earth. When one moves through the forests, his sense of discovery is quickened. Man is back in the environment from which he emerged to build factories, churches, and schools. He is primitive again, matching his wits against the earth and sky. He is free of the restraints of society and free of its safeguards too.
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Violence has no constitutional sanction; and every government from the beginning has moved against it. But where grievances pile high and most of the elected spokesmen represent the Establishment, violence may be the only effective response.
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Inanimate objects are sometimes parties to litigation. A ship has a legal personality, a fiction found useful for maritime purposes. The corporation sole - a creature of ecclesiastical law - is an acceptable adversary, and large fortunes ride on its cases... So it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life.
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The function of the prosecutor under the federal Constitution is not to tack as many skins of victims as possible against the wall. His function is to vindicate the rights of the people as expressed in the laws and give those accused of crime a fair trial.
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It seemed to me that I had barely reached the Court when people were trying to get me off.
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The interests of the corporation state are to convert all the riches of the earth into dollars.
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A function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it invites a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it passes for acceptance of an idea.
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Any test that turns on what is offensive to the community's standards is too loose, too capricious, too destructive of freedom of expression to be squared with the First Amendment. Under that test, juries can censor, suppress, and punish what they don't like, provided the matter relates to "sexual impurity" or has a tendency "to excite lustful thoughts." This is community censorship in one of its worst forms. It creates a regime where, in the battle between the literati and the Philistines, the Philistines are certain to win.
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We who have the final word can speak softly or angrily. We can seek to challenge and annoy, as we need not stay docile and quiet.