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Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor.

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
Literature
Moral
Offends
Censor
Suppressed
Disobedience
Censorship
Code
Merely

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Hiking a ridge, a meadow, a river bottom, is as healthy a form of exercise as one can get.
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The liberties of none are safe unless the liberties of all are protected.
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Effective self-government cannot succeed unless the people are immersed in a steady, robust, unimpeded, and uncensored flow of opinion and reporting which are continuously subjected to critique, rebuttal, and reexamination.
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There have always been grievances and youth has always been the agitator.
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Absolute discretion is a ruthless master. It is more destructive of freedom than any of man's other inventions.
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The privacy and dignity of our citizens is being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen - a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of a life.
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The purpose of the University of Washington cannot be to produce black lawyers for blacks, Polish lawyers for Poles, Jewish lawyers for Jews, Irish lawyers for Irish. It should be to produce good lawyers for Americans, and not to place First Amendment barriers against anyone.
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I do not know of any salvation for society except through eccentrics, misfits, dissenters, people who protest.
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I have the same confidence in the ability of our people to reject noxious literature as I have in their capacity to sort out the true from the false in theology, economics, or any other field.
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The dominant purpose of the First Amendment was to prohibit the widespread practice of government suppression of embarrassing information.
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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.
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It is our attitude toward free thought and free expression that will determine our fate. There must be no limit on the range of temperate discussion, no limits on thought. No subject must be taboo. No censor must preside at our assemblies.
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The Court's great power is its ability to educate, to provide moral leadership.
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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.
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The law is not a series of calculating machines where answers come tumbling out when the right levers are pushed.
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Trees have judicial standing, and probably grass too.
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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.
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Among the liberties of citizens that are guaranteed are ... the right to believe what one chooses, the right to differ from his neighbor, the right to pick and choose the political philosophy he likes best, the right to associate with whomever he chooses, the right to join groups he prefers.
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The rules when the giants play are the same as when the pygmies enter the market.
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The use of violence as an instrument of persuasion is therefore inviting and seems to the discontented to be the only effective protest.
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