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

William J. Brennan

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William J. Brennan
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Religious
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More quotes by William J. Brennan

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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.
William J. Brennan
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All ideas having even the slightest redeeming social importance - unorthodox ideas, controversial ideas, even ideas hateful to the prevailing climate of opinion, have the full protection of the guarantees [of the First Amendment].
William J. Brennan
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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.
William J. Brennan
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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.
William J. Brennan
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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.
William J. Brennan
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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.
William J. Brennan
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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.
William J. Brennan
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The genius of the Constitution rests not in any static meaning it might have had in a world that is dead and gone, but in the adaptability of its great principles to cope with current problems and current needs.
William J. Brennan
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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.
William J. Brennan
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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.
William J. Brennan
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More fundamentally, however, the answer to petitioners' objection is that there can be no impairment of executive power, whether on the state or federal level, where actions pursuant to that power are impermissible under the Constitution. Where there is no power, there can be no impairment of power.
William J. Brennan
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The Bill of Rights never gets off the page and into the lives of most Americans.
William J. Brennan
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Sex, a great and mysterious motive force in human life, has indisputably been a subject of absorbing interest to mankind through the ages.
William J. Brennan
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Sex and obscenity are not synonymous. Obscene material is material which deals with sex in a manner appealing to prurient interest.
William J. Brennan
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No doubt, there are those who believe that judges - and particularly dissenting judges - write to hear themselves say, as it were, 'I, I, I.' And no doubt, there are also those who believe that judges are, like Joan Didion, primarily engaged in the writing of fiction. I cannot agree with either of those propositions.
William J. Brennan
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We current justices read the Constitution in the only way that we can: as 20th-century Americans.
William J. Brennan
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If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.
William J. Brennan
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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.
William J. Brennan
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Use of a mentally ill person's involuntary confession is antithetical to the notion of fundamental fairness embodied in the due process clause.
William J. Brennan
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At bottom, the battle has been waged on moral grounds. The country has debated whether a society for which the dignity of the individual is the supreme value can, without a fundamental inconsistency, follow the practice of deliberately putting one of its members to death.
William J. Brennan