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The Court's great power is its ability to educate, to provide moral leadership.
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
Leadership
Moral
Ability
Power
Great
Educate
Provide
Court
More quotes by William O. Douglas
The way to combat noxious ideas is with other ideas. The way to combat falsehoods is with truth.
William O. Douglas
The first opinion the Court ever filed has a dissenting opinion. Dissent is a tradition of this Court... When someone is writing for the Court, he hopes to get eight others to agree with him, so many of the majority opinions are rather stultified.
William O. Douglas
When a legislature undertakes to proscribe the exercise of a citizen's constitutional right to free speech, it acts lawlessly and the citizen can take matters into his own hands and proceed on the basis that such a law is no law at all.
William O. Douglas
Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor.
William O. Douglas
When a man knows how to live amid danger, he is not afraid to die. When he is not afraid to die, he is, strangely, free to live.
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
Violence has no constitutional sanction and every government from the beginning has moved against it. But where grievances pile high and most of the elected spokesmen represent the Establishment, violence may be the only effective response.
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
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
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
The struggle is always between the individual and his sacred right to express himself and the power structure that seeks conformity, suppression, and obedience.
William O. Douglas
Trees have judicial standing, and probably grass too.
William O. Douglas
We must realize that today's establishment is the new George III. Whether it will continue to adhere to his tactics, we do not know. If it does, the redress, honored in tradition, is also revolution.
William O. Douglas
The Second Amendment reveals a profound principle of American government - the principle of civilian ascendency over the military.
William O. Douglas
But our society - unlike most in the world - presupposes that freedom and liberty are in a frame of reference that makes the individual, not government, the keeper of his tastes, beliefs, and ideas. That is the philosophy of the First Amendment and it is this article of faith that sets us apart from most nations in the world.
William O. Douglas
Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
William O. Douglas
I would rather create a precedent than find one.
William O. Douglas
Hiking a ridge, a meadow, a river bottom, is as healthy a form of exercise as one can get.
William O. Douglas
The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of people.
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
