Ambiguity Quote by William J. Brennan

“Our amended Constitution is the lodestar for our aspirations. Like every text worth reading, it is not crystalline. The phrasing is broad and the limitations of its provisions are not clearly marked. Its majestic generalities and ennobling pronouncements are both luminous and obscure. This ambiguity of course calls forth interpretation, the interaction of reader and text. The encounter with the Constitutional text has been, in many senses, my life's work.”

William J. Brennan

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If our free society is to endure, those who govern must recognize human dignity and accept the enforcement of constitutional limitations on their power…

William J. Brennan

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Capital punishment...treats members of the human race...as objects to be toyed with and discarded.

William J. Brennan

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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…

William J. Brennan

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The modern public school derived from a philosophy of freedom reflected in the First Amendment ... The non-sectarian or secular public school was the…

William J. Brennan

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If a policeman must know the Constitution, then why not a planner?

William J. Brennan

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Our statute books gradually became laden with gross, stereotyped distinctions between the sexes and, indeed, throughout much of the 19th century the position of women in our society was, in many respects, comparable to that of blacks under the pre-Civil War slave codes.

William J. Brennan

We cannot let colorblindness become myopia which masks the reality that many "created equal" have been treated within our lifetimes as inferior both by…

William J. Brennan

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After each perceived security crisis ended, the United States has remorsefully realized that the abrogation of civil liberties was unnecessary.

William J. Brennan

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The door of the Free Exercise Clause stands tightly closed against any government regulation of religious beliefs as such. Government may neither compel affirmation…

William J. Brennan

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One area of law more than any other besmirches the constitutional vision of human dignity. . . . The barbaric death penalty violates our Constitution. Even the most vile murderer does not release the state from its obligation to respect dignity, for the state does not honor the victim by< emulating his murderer. Capital punishment's fatal flaw is that it…

William J. Brennan

“Thus, we consider this case against the background of a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited,…

William J. Brennan

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Whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to prurient interest.

William J. Brennan

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The position is clear - there is no ambiguity in Sinn Fein's position. We, along with all the other parties, have signed up to…

Martin McGuinness

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Ambiguity is necessary in some of my stories, not in all. In those, it certainly contributes to the richness of the story. I doubt…

Gene Wolfe

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During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.

John le Carre

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You cannot grow in the integrative dance of action and contemplation without a strong tolerance for ambiguity, an ability to allow, forgive, and contain…

Richard Rohr

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I blame my grandfather 100 percent for his oldest son's death. I don't think there's any ambiguity there.

Mary L. Trump

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Yet again, an ancient answer echoes across the centuries: Listen! Listen to stories! For what stories do, above all else, is hold up a mirror so that we can see ourselves. Stories are mirrors of human be-ing, reflecting back our very essence. In a story, we come to know precisely the both/and, mixed-upped-ness of our very being. In the mirror…

Ernest Kurtz

My path to wisdom began when I stopped pretending to know things I didn't know. When I explicitly admitted to the limits of my…

Tucker Max

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If there is a single tragic flaw that mars our biggest enterprises, it is conservatism - the failure to fail, and fail big, in…

Tom Peters

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In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagination, I can't take positions that are closed. Everything I've ever…

Toni Morrison

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I've always been drawn to ambiguity in pop music.

Ezra Furman

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I believe that we can still have a genre of scientific books suitable for and accessible alike to professionals and interested laypeople. The concepts of science, in all their richness and ambiguity, can be presented without any compromise, without any simplification counting as distortion, in language accessible to all intelligent people. I hope that this book can be read with…

Stephen Jay Gould

I am in the utmost perplexity, yand have wished a hundred times, that if there is a A God, nature would manifest him without ambiguity, and that if there is not, every imaginary sign of his existence might vanish : in short, let nature speak distinctly, or be totally silent, and I shall know what course to take.

Blaise Pascal

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Ambiguity Quote by William J. Brennan

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