"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."

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Source : "The One Un-American Act". William O. Douglas' speech to the Author's Guild Council in New York on receiving the 1951 Lauterbach Award, December 3, 1952.

William O. Douglas

#Speech Quotes #Civil Rights Quotes #Defeat Quotes

“Labor is rest from the sorrows that greet us; from all the petty vexations that meet us; from the sin-promptings that assail us; from the world-sirens that lure us to ill”
“I mean, the job is Pearl Harbor. And you better not spends weeks and weeks and weeks trying to assign blame or deciding on a complete plan for fighting the whole war, you know, and letting a committee decide where the battleships should go and all of that. You better spring into action with the best people you have.”
“Coping with the demands of everyday life would be exceedingly trying if one could arrive at solutions to problems only by actually performing possible options and suffering the consequences.”
“At times it has been doubtful to me if Emerson really knows or feels what Poetry is at its highest, as in the Bible, for instance, or Homer or Shakspeare. I see he covertly or plainly likes best superb verbal polish, or something old or odd”
“I chose to present myself as one who comes from among the people, and I can be touched by their pain because I have my own.”
“We talk eloquently about our commitment to the principles of Christianity, and yet our lives are saturated with the practices of paganism. We proclaim our devotion to democracy, but we sadly practice the very opposite of the democratic creed.... This strange dichotomy, this agonizing gulf between the ought and the is, represents the tragic theme of man's earthly pilgrimage.”
“If your Soviet neighbor is trying to set fire to your house, you can't be worrying about the Arab down the block. If suddenly it's the Arab in your backyard , you can't be worrying about the People's Republic of China and if one day the ChiComs show up at your front door with an eviction notice in one hand and a Molotov cocktail in the other, then the last thing you're going do is look over his shoulder for a walking corpse.”
“You know, if you don't do nothin, you don't do nothin.”

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