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Quotes by William O. Douglas

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.
– William O. Douglas
As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there's a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such twilight that we must be aware of change in the air, however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.
– William O. Douglas
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.
– William O. Douglas
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.
– William O. Douglas
Common sense often makes good law.
– William O. Douglas
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.
– William O. Douglas
If discrimination based on race is constitutionally permissible when those who hold the reins can come up with compelling reasons to justify it, then constitutional guarantees acquire an accordionlike quality.
– William O. Douglas
It seemed to me that I had barely reached the Court when people were trying to get me off.
– William O. Douglas
Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor.
– William O. Douglas
Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred.
– William O. Douglas
No patent medicine was ever put to wider and more varied use than the Fourteenth Amendment.
– William O. Douglas
One who comes to the Court must come to adore, not to protest. That's the new gloss on the 1st Amendment.
– William O. Douglas
Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us?
– William O. Douglas
Tell the FBI that the kidnappers should pick out a judge that Nixon wants back.
– William O. Douglas
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.
– William O. Douglas
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.
– William O. Douglas
The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of people.
– William O. Douglas
The critical point is that the Constitution places the right of silence beyond the reach of government.
– William O. Douglas
The liberties of none are safe unless the liberties of all are protected.
– William O. Douglas
The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedoms.
– William O. Douglas
The right to revolt has sources deep in our history.
– William O. Douglas
We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.
– William O. Douglas
We deal with a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights-older than our political parties, older than our school system.
– William O. Douglas
We do not sit as a superlegislature to weigh the wisdom of legislation.
– William O. Douglas
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.
– William O. Douglas
When a legislature undertakes to proscribe the exercise of a citizen's constitutional rights 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.
– William O. Douglas
Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order, to efficiency of operation, to scientific advancement and the like.
– William O. Douglas
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.
– William O. Douglas
The way to combat noxious ideas is with other ideas. The way to combat falsehoods is with truth.
– William O. Douglas