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The law is not a series of calculating machines where answers come tumbling out when the right levers are pushed.
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
Pushed
Machines
Series
Answers
Law
Come
Tumbling
Right
Levers
Calculating
More quotes by 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
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
Religious experiences which are as real as life to some may be incomprehensible to others.
William O. Douglas
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
We are rapidly entering the age of no privacy, where everyone is open to surveillance at all times where there are no secrets from government.
William O. Douglas
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.
William O. Douglas
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
The First and Fourteenth Amendments say that Congress and the States shall make no law which abridges freedom of speech or of the press. In order to sanction a system of censorship I would have to say that no law does not mean what it says, that no law is qualified to mean some laws. I cannot take this step.
William O. Douglas
Freedom of movement is the very essence of our free society -- once the right to travel is curtailed, all other rights suffer.
William O. Douglas
Ideas are indeed the most dangerous weapons in the world. Our ideas of freedom are the most powerful political weapons man has ever forged.
William O. Douglas
My faith is that the only soul a man must save is his own.
William O. Douglas
I would rather create a precedent than find one.
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 most important aspect of freedom of speech is freedom to learn. All education is a continuous dialogue - questions and answers that pursue every problem on the horizon. That is the essence of academic freedom.
William O. Douglas
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
The critical point is that the Constitution places the right of silence beyond the reach of government.
William O. Douglas
Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor.
William O. Douglas
Security can only be achieved through constant change, through discarding old ideas that have outlived their usefulness and adapting others to current facts.
William O. Douglas
The right to dissent is the only thing that makes life tolerable for a judge of an appellate court... the affairs of government could not be conducted by democratic standards without it.
William O. Douglas
When man ventures into the wilderness, climbs the ridges, and sleeps in the forest, he comes in close communion with his Creator. When man pits himself against the mountain, he taps inner springs of his strength. He comes to know himself.
William O. Douglas