William O. Douglas Quotes

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

Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.

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.

To be whole and harmonious, man must also know the music of the beaches and the woods. He must find the thing of which he is only an infinitesimal part and nurture it and love it, if he is to live.

The Fifth Amendment is an old friend and a good friend, one of the great landmarks in men's struggle to be free of tyranny, to be decent and civilized.

The liberties of none are safe unless the liberties of all are protected.

Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us?

As night-fall does not come at once, neither does oppression...It is in such twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air - however slight - lest we become victims of the darkness.

Those in power need checks and restraints lest they come to identify the common good for their own tastes and desires, and their continuation in office as essential to the preservation of the nation.

The way to combat noxious ideas is with other ideas. The way to combat falsehoods is with truth.

The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of people.

I do not know of any salvation for society except through eccentrics, misfits, dissenters, people who protest.

Tell the FBI that the kidnappers should pick out a judge that Nixon wants back.

The Second Amendment reveals a profound principle of American government - the principle of civilian ascendency over the military.

Man must be able to escape civilization if he is to survive. Some of his greatest needs are for refuges and retreats where he can recapture for a day or a week the primitive conditions of life.

The great and invigorating influences in American life have been the unorthodox: the people who challenge an existing institution or way of life, or say and do things that make people think.

Man is whole when he is in tune with the winds, the stars, and the hills... Being in tune with the universe is the entire secrets.

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

The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom.

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

We who have the final word can speak softly or angrily. We can seek to challenge and annoy, as we need not stay docile and quiet.

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

Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

Power that controls the economy should be in the hands of elected representatives of the people, not in the hands of an industrial oligarchy.

The day should come when all of the forms of life... will stand before the court - the pileated woodpecker as well as the coyote and bear, the lemmings as well as the trout in the streams.

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

Security can only be achieved through constant change, through discarding old ideas that have outlived their usefulness and adapting others to current facts.

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

It is better, so the Fourth Amendment teaches us, that the guilty sometimes go free than the citizens be subject to easy arrest.

The right to revolt has sources deep in our history.

We deal with a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights-older than our political parties, older than our school system.

Our upside down welfare state is socialism for the rich, free enterprise for the poor.

My faith is that the only soul a man must save is his own.

The Court's great power is its ability to educate, to provide moral leadership.

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.

Free speech is not to be regulated like diseased cattle and impure butter. The audience (in this case, the judge or the jury) that hissed yesterday may applaud today, even for the same performance.

I would rather create a precedent than find one.

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

No patent medicine was ever put to wider and more varied use than the Fourteenth Amendment.

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

The one governmental agency that has no ambition.

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

Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred.

The right to dissent is the only thing that makes life tolerable for a judge of an appellate court... the affairs of government could not be conducted by democratic standards without it.

What a man thinks is no concern of the government.

The law is not a series of calculating machines where answers come tumbling out when the right levers are pushed.

The critical point is that the Constitution places the right of silence beyond the reach of government.

Common sense often makes a good law.

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

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