William Douglas Quotes (38 Quotes)


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

    I sat some minutes, lost in my thoughts of the beauty of the place.

    Mountains have a decent influence on men. I have never met along the trails of the high mountains a mean man who would cheat and steal. Certainly most men who are raised there or who work there are as wholesome as the mountains themselves. Those who explore them or foot or horseback usually are open, friendly men.

    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 influence of orthodoxy and standardized thought. They weighed the compulsions for restrained speech and thought against the abuses of liberty. They chose liberty.

    A people who extend civil liberties only to preferred groups start down the path either to dictatorship of the right or the left.


    The dissent we witness is a reaffirmation of faith in man it is protest against living under rules and prejudices and attitudes that produce the extremes of wealth and poverty and that make us dedicated to the destruction of people through arms, bombs, and gases, and that prepare us to think alike and be submissive objects for the regime of the computer.

    The court is really the keeper of the conscience, and the conscience is the Constitution.

    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 know how leveling that influence can be, how easy it is to computerize man and make him a servile thing in a vast industrial complex. . . . This means we must subject the machine -- technology -- to control and cease despoiling the earth and filling people with goodies merely to make money.

    The dissenting opinion has continued since 1792 as a great American tradition. It is as true to the character of our democracy as of speech itself.

    I can see you've done a lot of work, but you are off base here. If and when you get appointed to the Supreme Court you can write opinions as you choose.

    Every time you pick up the newspaper you read about one company merging with another company. Of course, we have laws to protect competition in the United States, but one can't help thinking that, if the trend continues the whole country will soon be merged into one large company.

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

    The privacy and dignity of our citizens are being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen -- a s

    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 the transformation of shopkeepers into employees. . . . The disappearance of free enterprise has led to a submergence of the individual in the impersonal corporation in much the same manner as he has been submerged in the state in other lands.

    The Free Exercise Clause protects the individual from any coercive measure that encourages him toward one faith or creed, discourages him from another, or makes it prudent or desirable for him to select one and embrace it.

    Violence has no constitutional sanction and every government from the beginning has moved against it. But where grievances pile high and most of the elected spokesmen represent the Establishment, violence may be the only effective response.

    After an American has been in a totalitarian country for several months, he is greatly relieved when he reaches home. He feels that bonds have been released and that he is free. He can speak above a whisper, and he walks relaxed and unguarded as though he were no longer being followed. After a recent trip I said to a neighbor, It's wonderful to be back in a nation where even a riot may be tolerated.

    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.

    Any test that turns on what is offensive to the community's standards is too loose, too capricious, too destructive of freedom of expression to be squared with the First Amendment. Under that test, juries can censor, suppress, and punish what they don't like, provided the matter relates to sexual impurity or has a tendency to excite lustful thoughts. This is community censorship in one of its worst forms.

    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.

    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 be a horsefly or a bird of paradise or a deer. So a man of such faith, looking at animals, might be looking at old friends or ancestors.

    Acceptance by government of a dissident press is a measure of the maturity of a nation.

    The truth is that a vast restructuring of our society is needed if remedies are to become available to the average person. Without that restructuring the good will that holds society together will be slowly dissipated. . . . It is that sense of futility which permeates the present series of protests and dissents. Where there is a persistent sense of futility, there is violence and that is where we are today.

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

    Christianity has sufficient inner strength to survive and flourish on its own. It does not need state subsidies, nor state privileges, nor state prestige. The more it obtains state support the greater it curtails human freedom.

    The function of the prosecutor under the federal Constitution is not to tack as many skins of victims as possible against the wall. His function is to vindicate the rights of the people as expressed in the laws and give those accused of crime a fair trial.

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

    I've often thought that if our zoning boards could be put in charge of botanists, of zoologists and geologists, and people who know about the earth, we would have much more wisdom in such planning than we have when we leave it to the engineers.

    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 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.

    The use of violence as an instrument of persuasion is therefore inviting and seems to the discontented to be the only effective protest.

    There are only two choices A police state in which all dissent is suppressed or rigidly controlled or a society where law is responsive to human needs. If society is to be responsive to human needs, a vast restructuring of our laws is essential.

    The idea of using censors to bar thoughts of sex is dangerous. A person without sex thoughts is abnormal.

    Man is about to be an automaton he is identifiable only in the computer. As a person of worth and creativity, as a being with an infinite potential, he retreats and battles the forces that make him inhuman.

    In the East the wilderness has no evil connotation it is thought of as an expression of the unity and harmony of the universe.

    Ignorance and illiteracy are obviously not synonymous even illiterate masses can cast their ballots with intelligence, once they are informed.

    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.


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