William O. Douglas Quotes

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.

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.

We must realize that today's establishment is the new George III. Whether it will continue to adhere to his tactics, we do not know. If it does, the redress, honored in tradition, is also revolution.

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

I hope to be remembered as someone who made the earth a little more beautiful.

The Constitution favors no racial group - no political or social group.

A road is a dagger placed in the heart of a wilderness.

Racial discrimination against a white is as unconstitutional as race discrimination against a black.

The conscience of this nation is the Constitution.

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

The right to work, I had assumed, was the most precious liberty that man possesses. Man has indeed as much right to work as he has to live, to be free, to own property.

A reporter is no better than his source of information.

The rules when the giants play are the same as when the pygmies enter the market.

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.

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

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

Trees have judicial standing, and probably grass too.

The struggle is always between the individual and his sacred right to express himself and the power structure that seeks conformity, suppression, and obedience.

The interests of the corporation state are to convert all the riches of the earth into dollars.

Ideas are indeed the most dangerous weapons in the world. Our ideas of freedom are the most powerful political weapons man has ever forged.

We need be bold and adventuresome in our thinking in order to survive.

I have the same confidence in the ability of our people to reject noxious literature as I have in their capacity to sort out the true from the false in theology, economics, or any other field.

When a man knows how to live amid danger, he is not afraid to die. When he is not afraid to die, he is, strangely, free to live.

Hiking a ridge, a meadow, a river bottom, is as healthy a form of exercise as one can get.

Fear of ideas makes us impotent and ineffective.

Common sense often makes good law.

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

Free speech is not to be regulated like diseased cattle and impure butter. The audience that hissed yesterday may applaud today, even for the same performance.

One who comes to the Court must come to adore, not to protest. That's the new gloss on the 1st Amendment.

We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.

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

The American government is premised on the theory that if the individual man is to be free, his ideas, his beliefs, his ideology, his philosophy, must be placed beyond the reach of government.

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

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 defea