William O. Douglas Quotes - Page 5

These unwritten amenities have been in part responsible for giving our people the feeling of independence and self-confidence, the feeling of creativity. These amenities have dignified the right of dissent and have honored the right to be nonconformists and the right to defy submissiveness. They have encouraged lives of high spirits rather than hushed, suffocating silence.

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.

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.

Effective self-government cannot succeed unless the people are immersed in a steady, robust, unimpeded, and uncensored flow of opinion and reporting which are continuously subjected to critique, rebuttal, and reexamination.

The free state offers what a police state denies - the privacy of the home, the dignity and peace of mind of the individual.

Fear of ideas makes us impotent and ineffective.

Religious experiences which are as real as life to some may be incomprehensible to others.

The conscience of this nation is the Constitution.

We do not sit as a super-legislature to weigh the wisdom of legislation.

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.

The first opinion the Court ever filed has a dissenting opinion. Dissent is a tradition of this Court... When someone is writing for the Court, he hopes to get eight others to agree with him, so many of the majority opinions are rather stultified.

I learned that the richness of life is found in adventure. . . . It develops self-reliance and independence. Life then teems with excitement. There is stagnation only in security.

Why cannot we work at cooperative schemes and search for the common ground binding all mankind together?

One who comes to the Court must come to adore, not to protest. That's the new gloss on the First Amendment.

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.

Absolute discretion is a ruthless master. It is more destructive of freedom than any of man's other inventions.

The Framers [of the Constitution] . . . created the federally protected right of silence and decreed that the law could not be used to pry open one's lips and make him a witness against himself.

Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor.

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.

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.

The people, the ultimate governors, must have absolute freedom of, and therefore privacy of, their individual opinions and beliefs regardless of how suspect or strange they may appear to others. Ancillary to that principle is the conclusion that an individual must also have absolute privacy over whatever information he may generate in the course of testing his opinions and beliefs.

There have always been grievances and youth has always been the agitator.

Motion pictures are of course a different medium of expression than the public speech, the radio, the stage, the novel, or the magazine. But the First Amendment draws no distinction between the various methods of communicating ideas.

Freedom of movement is the very essence of our free society -- once the right to travel is curtailed, all other rights suffer.

It seemed to me that I had barely reached the Court when people were trying to get me off.