William O. Douglas Quotes
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We know by now that if we make technology the predestined force in our lives, man will walk to the measure of its demands. We know how leveling that influence can be, how easy it is to computerize man and make him a servile thing in a vast industrial complex. . . . This means we must subject the machine - technology - to control and cease despoiling the earth and filling people with goodies merely to make money.
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Religious experiences which are as real as life to some may be incomprehensible to others.
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My faith is that the only soul a man must save is his own.
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The Constitution favors no racial group - no political or social group.
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I realized that Eastern thought had somewhat more compassion for all living things. Man was a form of life that in another reincarnation might possibly be a horsefly or a bird of paradise or a deer. So a man of such a faith, looking at animals, might be looking at old friends or ancestors. In the East the wilderness has no evil connotation; it is thought of as an expression of the unity and harmony of the universe.
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The free state offers what a police state denies - the privacy of the home, the dignity and peace of mind of the individual.
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Hiking a ridge, a meadow, a river bottom, is as healthy a form of exercise as one can get.
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What a man thinks is no concern of the government.
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The First Amendment...does not say that in every respect there shall be a separation of Church and State....Otherwise the state and religion would be aliens to each other - hostile, suspicious, and even unfriendly....The state may not establish a 'religion of secularism' in the sense of affirmatively opposing or showing hostility to religion, thus preferring those who believe in no religion over those who do believe.
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Political controls in the sense that we think of bureaus or departments of government can never ope to produce collaboration between groups in the inner wheels of our industrial organization. It must come from inner compulsions and desires.
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Hiking a ridge, a meadow, or a river bottom, is as healthy a form of exercise as one can get. Hiking seems to put all the body cells back into rhythm. Ten to twenty miles on a trail puts one to bed with his cares unraveled.
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It is better, so the Fourth Amendment teaches us, that the guilty sometimes go free than the citizens be subject to easy arrest.
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The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom.
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Man is whole when he is in tune with the winds, the stars, and the hills... Being in tune with the universe is the entire secrets.