William O. Douglas Quotes
- It is better, so the Fourth Amendment teaches us, that the guilty sometimes go free than the citizens be subject to easy arrest.
- The framers of the constitution knew human nature as well as we do. They too had lived in dangerous days; they too knew the suffocating…
- The function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it invites…
- Among the liberties of citizens that are guaranteed are ... the right to believe what one chooses, the right to differ from his neighbor, the…
- Ideas are indeed the most dangerous weapons in the world. Our ideas of freedom are the most powerful political weapons man has ever forged.
- When a legislature undertakes to proscribe the exercise of a citizen's constitutional rights it acts lawlessly and the citizen can take matters into his own…
- Common sense often makes a good law.
- 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.
- 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…
- My faith is that the only soul a man must save is his own.
- 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…
- The Arctic has a call that is compelling. The distant mountains [of the Brooks Range in Alaska] make one want to go on and on…
- Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor.
- 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.
- 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…
- To be whole and harmonious, man must also know the music of the beaches and the woods. He must find the thing of which he…
- I hope to be remembered as someone who made the earth a little more beautiful.
- The concept of the public welfare is broad and inclusive ... the values it represents are spiritual as well as physical, aesthetic as well as…
- Thus if the First Amendment means anything in this field, it must allow protests even against the moral code that the standard of the day…
- One aspect of modern life which has gone far to stifle men is the rapid growth of tremendous corporations. Enormous spiritual sacrifices are made in…