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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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More quotes by 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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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
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The quest for freedom, dignity, and the rights of man will never end.
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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The Bill of Rights never gets off the page and into the lives of most Americans.
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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Capital punishment...treats members of the human race...as objects to be toyed with and discarded.
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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Clerks get into the damnedest wrangles--which is the way they help me.
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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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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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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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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Religious conflict can be the bloodiest and cruelest conflicts that turn people into fanatics.
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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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
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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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If a policeman must know the Constitution, then why not a planner?
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