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A people who extend civil liberties only to preferred groups start down the path either to dictatorship of the right or the left.
William O. Douglas
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William O. Douglas
Age: 81 †
Born: 1898
Born: October 16
Died: 1980
Died: January 19
Former Associate Justice Of The Supreme Court Of The United States
Judge
Lawyer
Trade Unionist
University Teacher
William Orville Douglas
William Douglas
Right
Dictatorship
People
Civil
Groups
Liberty
Either
Path
Preferred
Start
Extend
Left
Liberties
More quotes by William O. Douglas
The law is not a series of calculating machines where answers come tumbling out when the right levers are pushed.
William O. Douglas
Men may believe what they cannot prove. They may not be put to the proof of their religious doctrines or beliefs. Religious experiences which are as real as life to some may be incomprehensible to others.
William O. Douglas
Man is whole when he is in tune with the winds, the stars, and the hills... Being in tune with the universe is the entire secrets.
William O. Douglas
Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.
William O. Douglas
One who comes to the Court must come to adore, not to protest. That's the new gloss on the First Amendment.
William O. Douglas
Hiking a ridge, a meadow, or a river bottom, is as healthy a form of exercise as one can get. Hiking seems to put all the body cells back into rhythm. Ten to twenty miles on a trail puts one to bed with his cares unraveled.
William O. Douglas
Our upside down welfare state is socialism for the rich, free enterprise for the poor.
William O. Douglas
The function of the prosecutor under the federal Constitution is not to tack as many skins of victims as possible against the wall. His function is to vindicate the rights of the people as expressed in the laws and give those accused of crime a fair trial.
William O. Douglas
The First Amendment makes confidence in the common sense of our people and in the maturity of their judgement the great postulate of our democracy.
William O. Douglas
The right to work, I had assumed, was the most precious liberty that man possesses. Man has indeed as much right to work as he has to live, to be free, to own property.
William O. Douglas
The conscience of this nation is the Constitution.
William O. Douglas
Those in power need checks and restraints lest they come to identify the common good for their own tastes and desires, and their continuation in office as essential to the preservation of the nation.
William O. Douglas
I do not know of any salvation for society except through eccentrics, misfits, dissenters, people who protest.
William O. Douglas
The Arctic has a call that is compelling. The distant mountains [of the Brooks Range in Alaska] make one want to go on and on over the next ridge and over the one beyond. The call is that of a wilderness known only to a few...This last American wilderness must remain sacrosanct.
William O. Douglas
The one governmental agency that has no ambition.
William O. Douglas
The framers of the constitution knew human nature as well as we do. They too had lived in dangerous days they too knew the suffocating influence of orthodoxy and standardized thought. They weighed the compulsions for restrained speech and thought against the abuses of liberty. They chose liberty.
William O. Douglas
The great and invigorating influences in American life have been the unorthodox: the people who challenge an existing institution or way of life, or say and do things that make people think.
William O. Douglas
Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
William O. Douglas
Man must be able to escape civilization if he is to survive. Some of his greatest needs are for refuges and retreats where he can recapture for a day or a week the primitive conditions of life.
William O. Douglas
Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor.
William O. Douglas
