William Douglas Quotes on Government (7 Quotes)

Government should be concerned with anti-social conduct, not with utterances.

The First Amendment commands government to have no interest in theology or ritual it admonishes the government to be interested in allowing religious freedom to flourish -- whether the result is to produce Catholics, Jews, or Protestants, or to turn the people toward the path of Buddha, or to end in a predominantly Moslem nation, or to produce in the long run atheists or agnostics. On matters of this kind, government must remain neutral. This freedom plainly includes freedom from religion with the right to believe, speak, write, publish and advocate antireligious programs.

If the government is in jeopardy, it is not because we are unable to cope with revolutionary situations. Jeopardy means that either the leaders or the people do not realize they have all the tools required to make the revolution come true. The tools and the opportunity exist. Only the moral imagination is missing.

The dominant purpose of the First Amendment was to prohibit the widespread practice of government suppression of embarrassing information.

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.

The function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when in it invites a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger.

The search of the young today is more specific than the ancient search for the Holy Grail. The search of the youth today is for ways and means to make the machine -- and the vast bureaucracy of the corporation state and of government that runs that machine -- the servant of man. . . . That is the revolution that is coming. . . . It could be a revolution in the nature of an explosive political regeneration. It depends on how wise the Establishment is. If, with its stockpile of arms, it resolves to suppress the dissenters, America will face, I fear, an awful ordeal.