Top 90 William O. Douglas Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

— William O. Douglas

3. “Ideas are indeed the most dangerous weapons in the world. Our ideas of freedom are the most powerful political weapons man has ever forged.”

— William O. Douglas

4. “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

5. “The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedoms.”

— William O. Douglas

6. “Fear of ideas makes us impotent and ineffective.”

— William O. Douglas

7. “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

8. “The liberties of none are safe unless the liberties of all are protected.”

— William O. Douglas

9. “A road is a dagger placed in the heart of a wilderness.”

— William O. Douglas

10. “Common sense often makes a good law.”

— William O. Douglas

11. “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

12. “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

13. “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.”

— William O. Douglas

14. “Trees have judicial standing, and probably grass too.”

— William O. Douglas

15. “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

16. “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

17. “The court is really the keeper of the conscience, and the conscience is the Constitution.”

— William O. Douglas

18. “I hope to be remembered as someone who made the earth a little more beautiful.”

— William O. Douglas

19. “I’ve often thought that if planners were botanists, zoologists, geologists, and people who know about the earth, we would have much more wisdom in such planning than we have when we leave it to the engineers.”

— William O. Douglas

20. “We need to be bold and adventurous in our thinking in order to survive.”

— William O. Douglas

21. “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

22. “Political controls in the sense that we think of bureaus or departments of government can never ope to produce collaboration between groups in the inner wheels of our industrial organization. It must come from inner compulsions and desires.”

— William O. Douglas

23. “A people who extend civil liberties only to preferred groups start down the path either to dictatorship of the right or the left.”

— William O. Douglas

24. “The Court’s great power is its ability to educate, to provide moral leadership.”

— William O. Douglas

25. “If discrimination based on race is constitutionally permissible when those who hold the reins can come up with “compelling” reasons to justify it, then constitutional guarantees acquire an accordionlike quality.”

— William O. Douglas

26. “A reporter is no better than his source of information.”

— William O. Douglas

27. “I would rather create a precedent than find one.”

— William O. Douglas

28. “Absolute discretion is a ruthless master. It is more destructive of freedom than any of man’s other inventions.”

— William O. Douglas

29. “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

30. “The dominant purpose of the First Amendment was to prohibit the widespread practice of government suppression of embarrassing information.”

— William O. Douglas

31. “Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred.”

— William O. Douglas

32. “The way to combat noxious ideas is with other ideas. The way to combat falsehoods is with truth.”

— William O. Douglas

33. “Our upside down welfare state is socialism for the rich, free enterprise for the poor.”

— William O. Douglas

34. “Acceptance by government of a dissident press is a measure of the maturity of a nation.”

— William O. Douglas

35. “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

36. “Power that controls the economy should be in the hands of elected representatives of the people instead of an industrial oligarchy.”

— William O. Douglas

37. “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

38. “Those in power are blind devotees to private enterprise. They accept that degree of socialism implicit in the vast subsidies to the military-industrial-complex, but not that type of socialism which maintains public projects for the disemployed and the unemployed alike.”

— William O. Douglas

39. “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

40. “The law is not a series of calculating machines where answers come tumbling out when the right levers are pushed.”

— William O. Douglas

41. “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

42. “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

43. “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

44. “The Second Amendment reveals a profound principle of American government – the principle of civilian ascendency over the military.”

— William O. Douglas

45. “The right to work, I had assumed, was the most precious liberty that man possesses. Man has indeed as much right to work as he has to live, to be free, to own property.”

— William O. Douglas

46. “When man ventures into the wilderness, climbs the ridges, and sleeps in the forest, he comes in close communion with his Creator. When man pits himself against the mountain, he taps inner springs of his strength. He comes to know himself.”

— William O. Douglas

47. “Hiking a ridge, a meadow, a river bottom, is as healthy a form of exercise as one can get.”

— William O. Douglas

48. “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

49. “The rules when the giants play are the same as when the pygmies enter the market.”

— William O. Douglas

50. “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