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The censor is always quick to justify his function in terms that are protective of society. But the First Amendment, written in terms that are absolute, deprives the States of any power to pass on the value, the propriety, or the morality of a particular expression.

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
Society
Morality
Protective
Values
Function
Amendment
Power
Terms
Amendments
States
Value
Quick
Firsts
Expression
Justify
First
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Absolutes
Deprives
Always
Written
Absolute
Censor
Term
Pass
Propriety

More quotes by William O. Douglas

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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.
William O. Douglas
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The dominant purpose of the First Amendment was to prohibit the widespread practice of government suppression of embarrassing information.
William O. Douglas
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Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order, to efficiency of operation, to scientific advancement and the like.
William O. Douglas
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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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Racial discrimination against a white is as unconstitutional as race discrimination against a black.
William O. Douglas
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The court is really the keeper of the conscience, and the conscience is the Constitution.
William O. Douglas
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There have always been grievances and youth has always been the agitator.
William O. Douglas
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Political controls in the sense that we think of bureaus or departments of government can never ope to produce collaboration between groups in the inner wheels of our industrial organization. It must come from inner compulsions and desires.
William O. Douglas
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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
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The critical point is that the Constitution places the right of silence beyond the reach of government.
William O. Douglas
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Those in power are blind devotees to private enterprise. They accept that degree of socialism implicit in the vast subsidies to the military-industrial-complex, but not that type of socialism which maintains public projects for the disemployed and the unemployed alike.
William O. Douglas
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To be whole and harmonious, man must also know the music of the beaches and the woods. He must find the thing of which he is only an infinitesimal part and nurture it and love it, if he is to live.
William O. Douglas
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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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I would rather create a precedent than find one.
William O. Douglas
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At the constitutional level where we work, 90 percent of any decision is emotional. The rational part of us supplies the reasons for supporting our predilections.
William O. Douglas
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I think that the influence towards suppression of minority views - towards orthodoxy in thinking about public issues - has been more subconscious than unconscious, stemming to a very great extent from the tendency of Americans to conform...not to deviate or depart from an orthodox point of view.
William O. Douglas
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The Framers [of the Constitution] . . . created the federally protected right of silence and decreed that the law could not be used to pry open one's lips and make him a witness against himself.
William O. Douglas
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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
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The one governmental agency that has no ambition.
William O. Douglas
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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.
William O. Douglas