William O. Douglas
Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred.Collection: Anniversary
Common sense often makes good law.Collection: Legal
Tell the FBI that the kidnappers should pick out a judge that Nixon wants back.Collection: History
We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.Collection: Religion
One who comes to the Court must come to adore, not to protest. That's the new gloss on the 1st Amendment.Collection: History
The 5th 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.Collection: Great
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.Collection: Politics
We do not sit as a superlegislature to weigh the wisdom of legislation.Collection: Wisdom
As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such a twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air - however slight - lest we become unwitting victims of darkness.Collection: Change
The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedoms.Collection: Alone
The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of people.Collection: Government
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.
The association promotes a way of life, not causes; a harmony in living, not political faiths; a bilateral loyalty, not commercial or social projects. Yet it is an association for as noble a purpose as any involved in any prior decisions.
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?
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.
It seemed to me that I had barely reached the Court when people were trying to get me off.
The critical point is that the Constitution places the right of silence beyond the reach of government.
No patent medicine was ever put to wider and more varied use than the Fourteenth Amendment.
The right to revolt has sources deep in our history.
Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor.
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.Collection: Teaching
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.Collection: Fall
The Constitution and the Bill of Rights we designed to get the government off the backs of the people -- all the people. Those great documents guarantee to us all the rights to personal and spiritual self-fulfillment. But that guarantee is not self-executing. As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such a twilight that we all must be most aware of the change in the air -- however slight -- lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.Collection: Spiritual
I do not know of any salvation for society except through eccentrics, misfits, dissenters, people who protest.Collection: People
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.Collection: Power
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.Collection: Beach
I learned early that the richness of life is found in adventure. Adventure calls on all the faculties of mind and spirit. It develops self-reliance and independence. Life then teems with excitement. But man is not ready for adventure unless he is rid of fear. For fear confines him and limits his scope. He stays tethered by strings of doubt and indecision and has only a small and narrow world to explore.Collection: Adventure
A function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it invites a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it passes for acceptance of an idea.Collection: Acceptance
The way to combat noxious ideas is with other ideas. The way to combat falsehoods is with truth.Collection: Ideas
When a legislature undertakes to proscribe the exercise of a citizen's constitutional right to free speech, it acts lawlessly; and the citizen can take matters into his own hands and proceed on the basis that such a law is no law at all.Collection: Exercise
When man ventures into the wilderness, climbs the ridges, and sleeps in the forest, he comes in close communion with his Creator. When man pits himself against the mountain, he taps inner springs of his strength. He comes to know himself.Collection: Spring
Only when there is a wilderness can man harmonize his inner being with the wavelengths of the earth. When the earth, its products, its creatures, become his concern, man is caught up in a cause greater than his own life and more meaningful. Only when man loses himself in an endeavor of that magnitude does he walk and live with humanity and reverence.Collection: Meaningful
A people who extend civil liberties only to preferred groups start down the path either to dictatorship of the right or the left.Collection: People
The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom.Collection: Freedom
The struggle is always between the individual and his sacred right to express himself and the power structure that seeks conformity, suppression, and obedience.Collection: Struggle
I would rather create a precedent than find one.Collection: Law
Trees have judicial standing, and probably grass too.Collection: Tree
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.Collection: Stars
Sunlight is the best disinfectant.Collection: Honesty
Hiking a ridge, a meadow, or a river bottom, is as healthy a form of exercise as one can get. Hiking seems to put all the body cells back into rhythm. Ten to twenty miles on a trail puts one to bed with his cares unraveled.Collection: Nature
The Second Amendment reveals a profound principle of American government - the principle of civilian ascendency over the military.Collection: Military
The privacy and dignity of our citizens is 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 society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of a life.Collection: Taken
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.Collection: Law
Absolute discretion is a ruthless master. It is more destructive of freedom than any of man's other inventions.Collection: Men
Political controls in the sense that we think of bureaus or departments of government can never ope to produce collaboration between groups in the inner wheels of our industrial organization. It must come from inner compulsions and desires.Collection: Thinking
The rules when the giants play are the same as when the pygmies enter the market.Collection: Play
We recognize the force of the argument that the effects of war under modern conditions may be felt in the economy for years and years, and that if the war power can be used in days of peace to treat all the wounds which war inflicts on our society, it may not only swallow up all other powers of Congress but largely obliterate the Ninth and the Tenth Amendments as well.Collection: War
One who comes to the Court must come to adore, not to protest. That's the new gloss on the First Amendment.Collection: History
Freedom of movement is the very essence of our free society -- once the right to travel is curtailed, all other rights suffer.Collection: Rights