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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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William J. Brennan
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More quotes by William J. Brennan
The Constitution was framed fundamentally as a bulwark against governmental power, and preventing the arbitrary administration of punishment is a basic ideal of any society that purports to be governed by the rule of law.
William J. Brennan
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
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
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
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
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
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
We hold that the Constitution does not forbid the states minor intrusions into an individual's body under stringently limited conditions.
William J. Brennan
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
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
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
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
Religious conflict can be the bloodiest and cruelest conflicts that turn people into fanatics.
William J. Brennan
We must meet the challenge rather than wish it were not before us.
William J. Brennan
We current justices read the Constitution in the only way that we can: as 20th-century Americans.
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 framers knew that liberty is a fragile thing, and so should we.
William J. Brennan
There is no such thing as a false idea.
William J. Brennan
Law cannot stand aside from the social changes around it.
William J. Brennan
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