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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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William J. Brennan
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More quotes by 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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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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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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Authoritative interpretations of the First Amendment guarantees have consistently refused to recognize an exception for any test of truth whether administered by judges, juries, or administrative officials and especially one that puts the burden of proving truth on the speaker.
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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It is tempting to pretend that minorities on death row share a fate in no way connected to our own, that our treatment of them sounds no echoes beyond the chambers in which they die. Such an illusion is ultimately corrosive, for the reverberations of injustice are not so easily confined.
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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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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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.
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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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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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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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We current justices read the Constitution in the only way that we can: as 20th-century Americans.
William J. Brennan
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We cannot let colorblindness become myopia which masks the reality that many created equal have been treated within our lifetimes as inferior both by the law and by their fellow citizens.
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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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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There is no such thing as a false idea.
William J. Brennan
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If our free society is to endure, and I know it will, those who govern must recognize that the Framers of the Constitution limited their power in order to preserve human dignity and the air of freedom which is our proudest heritage.
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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If the right to privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion.
William J. Brennan