William J. Brennan Quotes

43 quotes in 835 categories

• Congress acknowledged that society's accumulated myths and fears about disability and disease are as handicapping as are the physical limitations that flow from actual impairment.
• The Framers of the Bill of Rights did not purport to 'create' rights. Rather, they designed the Bill of Rights to prohibit our Government from…
• Use of a mentally ill person's involuntary confession is antithetical to the notion of fundamental fairness embodied in the due process clause.
• Sex and obscenity are not synonymous. Obscene material is material which deals with sex in a manner appealing to prurient interest.
• Appellant constituted a legitimate class of one, and this provides a basis for Congress's decision to proceed with dispatch with respect to his materials.
• If we are to be as a shining city upon a hill, it will be because of our ceaseless pursuit of the constitutional ideal of…
• If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because…
• Perhaps the bleakest fact of all is that the death penalty is imposed not only in a freakish and discriminatory manner, but also in some…
• The calculated killing of a human being by the state involves, by its very nature, an absolute denial of the executed person's humanity. The most…
• With respect to the death penalty, I believe that a majority of the Supreme Court will one day accept that when the state punishes with…
• At bottom, the battle has been waged on moral grounds. The country has debated whether a society for which the dignity of the individual is…
• It is tempting to pretend that minorities on death row share a fate in no way connected to our own, that our treatment of them…
• Debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust and wide-open and that...may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public…
• The genius of the Constitution rests not in any static meaning it might have had in a world that is dead and gone, but in…
• If our free society is to endure, those who govern must recognize human dignity and accept the enforcement of constitutional limitations on their power conceived…
• After each perceived security crisis ended, the United States has remorsefully realized that the abrogation of civil liberties was unnecessary.
• There can be no doubt that our Nation has had a long and unfortunate history of sex discrimination. Traditionally, such discrimination was rationalized by an…
• Death is not only an unusually severe punishment, unusual in its pain, in its finality and in its enormity, but is serves no penal purpose…
• Law cannot stand aside from the social changes around it.
• We look to the history of the time of framing and to the intervening history of interpretation. But the ultimate question must be, what do…

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