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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
Turns
Bloodiest
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More quotes by William J. Brennan

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After each perceived security crisis ended, the United States has remorsefully realized that the abrogation of civil liberties was unnecessary.
William J. Brennan
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Law cannot stand aside from the social changes around it.
William J. Brennan
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The calculated killing of a human being by the state involves, by its very nature, an absolute denial of the executed person's humanity. The most vile murder does not, in my view, release the state from constitutional restraint on the destruction of human dignity.
William J. Brennan
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The framers knew that liberty is a fragile thing, and so should we.
William J. Brennan
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The principle inherent in the clause that prohibits pointless infliction of excessive punishment when less severe punishment can adequately achieve the same purposes invalidates the punishment.
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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Punishing desecration of the flag dilutes the very freedom that makes this emblem so revered.
William J. Brennan
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Consequences flow from a justice's interpretation in a direct and immediate way. A judicial decision respecting the incompatibility of Jim Crow with a constitutional guarantee of equality is not simply a contemplative exercise in defining the shape of a just society. It is an order
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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There is no such thing as a false idea.
William J. Brennan
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It is difficult to understand precisely what the state hopes to achieve by promoting the creation and perpetuation of a subclass of illiterates within our boundaries, surely adding to the problems and costs of unemployment, welfare and crime.
William J. Brennan
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Death is not only an unusually severe punishment, unusual in its pain, in its finality and in its enormity, but is serves no penal purpose more effectively than a less severe punishment.
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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We hold that the Constitution does not forbid the states minor intrusions into an individual's body under stringently limited conditions.
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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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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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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Whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to prurient interest.
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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The Framers of the Bill of Rights did not purport to 'create' rights. Rather, they designed the Bill of Rights to prohibit our Government from infringing rights and liberties presumed to be preexisting.
William J. Brennan