Quotes by William Douglas

• Tell the FBI that the kidnappers should pick out a judge that Nixon wants back.
• We do not sit as a superlegislature to weigh the wisdom of legislation.
• We who have the final word can speak softly or angrily. We can seek to challenge and annoy, as we need not stay docile and quiet.
• The right to revolt has sources deep in our history.
• The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedoms.
• The liberties of none are safe unless the liberties of all are protected.
• The critical point is that the Constitution places the right of silence beyond the reach of government.
• The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of people.
• The 5th Amendment is an old friend and a good friend. one of the great landmarks in men's struggle to be free of tyranny, to be decent and civilized.
• Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us?
• One who comes to the Court must come to adore, not to protest. That's the new gloss on the 1st Amendment.
• No patent medicine was ever put to wider and more varied use than the Fourteenth Amendment.
• Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred.
• Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor.
• It seemed to me that I had barely reached the Court when people were trying to get me off.
• Free speech is not to be regulated like diseased cattle and impure butter. The audience that hissed yesterday may applaud today, even for the same performance.
• Common sense often makes good law.
• 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.
• We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.
• The association promotes a way of life, not causes; a harmony in living, not political faiths; a bilateral loyalty, not commercial or social projects. Yet it is an association for as noble a purpose as any involved in any prior decisions.
• Society grows great when people plant trees under whose shade they know they will never sit.