William O. Douglas famous quotes

03-28-2025

Only when there is a wilderness can man harmonize his inner being with the wavelengths of the earth. When the earth, its products, its creatures, become his concern, man is caught up in a cause greater than his own life and more meaningful. Only when man loses himself in an endeavor of that magnitude does he walk and live with humanity and reverence.
-- William O. Douglas

#Meaningful #Men #Humanity
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

#Beach #Nature #Men
When a legislature undertakes to proscribe the exercise of a citizen's constitutional rights 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

#Exercise #Hands #Law
The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of people.
-- William O. Douglas

#America #Government #People
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

#Abuse #Liberty #Speech
The liberties of none are safe unless the liberties of all are protected.
-- William O. Douglas

#Freedom #Liberty #Atheism
The way to combat noxious ideas is with other ideas. The way to combat falsehoods is with truth.
-- William O. Douglas

#Ideas #Way #Combat
Once the government can demand of a publisher the names of the purchasers of his publication, the free press as we know it disappears. Then the spectre of a government agent will look over the shoulder of everyone who reads. ... Fear of criticism goes with every person into the bookstall. The subtle, imponderable pressures of the orthodox lay hold. Some will fear to read what is unpopular, what the powers-that-be dislike. ... fear will take the place of freedom in the libraries, book stores, and homes in the land.
-- William O. Douglas

#Book #Home #Government
Those in power need checks and restraints lest they come to identify the common good for their own tastes and desires, and their continuation in office as essential to the preservation of the nation.
-- William O. Douglas

#Power #Office #Desire
Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.
-- William O. Douglas

#Speech #Civil Rights #Defeat
Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us?
-- William O. Douglas

#Fear #History #Bows
The critical point is that the Constitution places the right of silence beyond the reach of government.
-- William O. Douglas

#Government #Silence #Constitution
Tell the FBI that the kidnappers should pick out a judge that Nixon wants back.
-- William O. Douglas

#Judging #History #Want
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

#Stars #Men #Wind
My faith is that the only soul a man must save is his own.
-- William O. Douglas

#Men #Soul #Religion
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

#Men #Civilization #Needs
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

#Government #Secret #Age
It is our attitude toward free thought and free expression that will determine our fate. There must be no limit on the range of temperate discussion, no limits on thought. No subject must be taboo. No censor must preside at our assemblies.
-- William O. Douglas

#Attitude #Fate #Expression
Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
-- William O. Douglas

#Sunlight
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.
-- William O. Douglas

#Yesterday #History #Democracy
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.
-- William O. Douglas

#Friendship #Struggle #Good Friend
It is better, so the Fourth Amendment teaches us, that the guilty sometimes go free than the citizens be subject to easy arrest.
-- William O. Douglas

#Liberty #Citizens #Sometimes
We recognize the force of the argument that the effects of war under modern conditions may be felt in the economy for years and years, and that if the war power can be used in days of peace to treat all the wounds which war inflicts on our society, it may not only swallow up all other powers of Congress but largely obliterate the Ninth and the Tenth Amendments as well.
-- William O. Douglas

#War #Power #Years
The Second Amendment reveals a profound principle of American government - the principle of civilian ascendency over the military.
-- William O. Douglas

#Military #Men #America
The function of the prosecutor under the federal Constitution is not to tack as many skins of victims as possible against the wall. His function is to vindicate the rights of the people as expressed in the laws and give those accused of crime a fair trial.
-- William O. Douglas

#Wall #Rights #Law

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