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There is no such thing as a false idea.
William J. Brennan
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William J. Brennan
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More quotes by William J. Brennan
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
We current justices read the Constitution in the only way that we can: as 20th-century Americans.
William J. Brennan
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
We must meet the challenge rather than wish it were not before us.
William J. Brennan
The Bill of Rights never gets off the page and into the lives of most Americans.
William J. Brennan
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
We do not consecrate the flag by punishing its desecration, for in doing so, we dilute the freedom this cherished emblem represents.
William J. Brennan
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
Punishing desecration of the flag dilutes the very freedom that makes this emblem so revered.
William J. Brennan
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
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
The door of the Free Exercise Clause stands tightly closed against any government regulation of religious beliefs as such. Government may neither compel affirmation of a repugnant belief, nor penalize or discriminate against individuals or groups because they hold views abhorrent to the authorities.
William J. Brennan
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
The public schools are supported entirely, in most communities, by public funds-funds exacted not only from parents, nor alone from those who hold particular religious views, nor indeed from those who subscribe to any creed at all.
William J. Brennan
Our statute books gradually became laden with gross, stereotyped distinctions between the sexes and, indeed, throughout much of the 19th century the position of women in our society was, in many respects, comparable to that of blacks under the pre-Civil War slave codes.
William J. Brennan
Clerks get into the damnedest wrangles--which is the way they help me.
William J. Brennan
We hold that the Constitution does not forbid the states minor intrusions into an individual's body under stringently limited conditions.
William J. Brennan
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
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
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
