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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

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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
Dies
Free
Live
Men
Strangely
Amid
Danger
Afraid

More quotes by William O. Douglas

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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
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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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What a man thinks is no concern of the government.
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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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
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The way to combat noxious ideas is with other ideas. The way to combat falsehoods is with truth.
William O. Douglas
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We deal with a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights-older than our political parties, older than our school system.
William O. Douglas
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Free speech is not to be regulated like diseased cattle and impure butter. The audience (in this case, the judge or the jury) that hissed yesterday may applaud today, even for the same performance.
William O. Douglas
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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
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The Free Exercise Clause protects the individual from any coercive measure that encourages him toward one faith or creed, discourages him from another, or makes it prudent or desirable for him to select one and embrace it.
William O. Douglas
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No patent medicine was ever put to wider and more varied use than the Fourteenth Amendment.
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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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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The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom.
William O. Douglas
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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
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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.
William O. Douglas
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The concept of the public welfare is broad and inclusive ... the values it represents are spiritual as well as physical, aesthetic as well as monetary. It is within the power of the legislature to determine that the community should be beautiful as well as healthy, spacious as well as clean, well balanced as well as carefully patroled.
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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Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor.
William O. Douglas
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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