William J. Brennan Quotes

Death is not only an unusually severe punishment, unusual in its pain, in its finality and in its enormity, but is serves no penal purpose more effectively than a less severe punishment.

We do not consecrate the flag by punishing its desecration, for in doing so, we dilute the freedom this cherished emblem represents.

If the right to privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion.

There are no menial jobs, only menial attitudes.

We must meet the challenge rather than wish it were not before us.

Religious conflict can be the bloodiest and cruelest conflicts that turn people into fanatics.

Perhaps the bleakest fact of all is that the death penalty is imposed not only in a freakish and discriminatory manner, but also in some cases upon defendants who are actually innocent.

We cannot let colorblindness become myopia which masks the reality that many "created equal" have been treated within our lifetimes as inferior both by the law and by their fellow citizens.

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

Use of a mentally ill person's involuntary confession is antithetical to the notion of fundamental fairness embodied in the due process clause.

The framers knew that liberty is a fragile thing, and so should we.

The quest for freedom, dignity, and the rights of man will never end.

You in the media ought to be ashamed of yourselves to call the provisions and the guarantees of the Bill of Rights 'Technicalities'. They're not. We are what we are because of those guarantees.

Law cannot stand aside from the social changes around it.

Punishing desecration of the flag dilutes the very freedom that makes this emblem so revered.

If we are to be as a shining city upon a hill, it will be because of our ceaseless pursuit of the constitutional ideal of human dignity.

No longer is the female destined solely for the home and the rearing of the family and only the male for the marketplace and the world of ideas.

There is no such thing as a false idea.

The principle inherent in the clause that prohibits pointless infliction of excessive punishment when less severe punishment can adequately achieve the same purposes invalidates the punishment.

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

The law is not an end in itself, nor does it provide ends. It is preeminently a means to serve what we think is right.

Congress acknowledged that society's accumulated myths and fears about disability and disease are as handicapping as are the physical limitations that flow from actual impairment.

We current justices read the Constitution in the only way that we can: as 20th-century Americans.

We look to the history of the time of framing and to the intervening history of interpretation. But the ultimate question must be, what do the words of the text mean in our time.

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 public officials.

Appellant constituted a legitimate class of one, and this provides a basis for Congress's decision to proceed with dispatch with respect to his materials.

We hold that the Constitution does not forbid the states minor intrusions into an individual's body under stringently limited conditions.

The Bill of Rights never gets off the page and into the lives of most Americans.

Clerks get into the damnedest wrangles--which is the way they help me.

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

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