Top 90 William O. Douglas Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of people.”

— William O. Douglas

52. “The use of violence as an instrument of persuasion is therefore inviting and seems to the discontented to be the only effective protest.”

— William O. Douglas

53. “I do not envy those whose introduction to nature was lush meadows, lakes, and swamps where life abounds. The desert hills of Yakima had a poverty that sharpened perception.”

— William O. Douglas

54. “The great and invigorating influences in American life have been the unorthodox: the people who challenge an existing institution or way of life, or say and do things that make people think.”

— William O. Douglas

55. “There have always been grievances and youth has always been the agitator.”

— William O. Douglas

56. “World federation is an ideal that will not die. More and more people are coming to realize that peace must be more than an interlude if we are to survive; that peace is a produce of law and order; that law is essential if the force of arms is not to rule the world.”

— William O. Douglas

57. “Effective self-government cannot succeed unless the people are immersed in a steady, robust, unimpeded, and uncensored flow of opinion and reporting which are continuously subjected to critique, rebuttal, and reexamination.”

— William O. Douglas

58. “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

59. “Violence has no constitutional sanction; and every government from the beginning has moved against it. But where grievances pile high and most of the elected spokesmen represent the Establishment, violence may be the only effective response.”

— William O. Douglas

60. “Tell the FBI that the kidnappers should pick out a judge that Nixon wants back.”

— William O. Douglas

61. “Racial discrimination against a white is as unconstitutional as race discrimination against a black.”

— William O. Douglas

62. “The challenge to our liberties comes frequently not from those who consciously seek to destroy our system of government, but from men of goodwill – good men who allow their proper concerns to blind them to the fact that what they propose to accomplish involves an impairment of liberty.”

— William O. Douglas

63. “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

64. “Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor.”

— William O. Douglas

65. “Hiking a ridge, a meadow, or a river bottom, is as healthy a form of exercise as one can get. Hiking seems to put all the body cells back into rhythm. Ten to twenty miles on a trail puts one to bed with his cares unraveled.”

— William O. Douglas

66. “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.”

— William O. Douglas

67. “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

68. “The First Amendment makes confidence in the common sense of our people and in the maturity of their judgement the great postulate of our democracy.”

— William O. Douglas

69. “The right to revolt has sources deep in our history.”

— William O. Douglas

70. “Thus if the First Amendment means anything in this field, it must allow protests even against the moral code that the standard of the day sets for the community. In other words, literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor.”

— William O. Douglas

71. “The free state offers what a police state denies – the privacy of the home, the dignity and peace of mind of the individual.”

— William O. Douglas

72. “The one governmental agency that has no ambition.”

— William O. Douglas

73. “One who comes to the Court must come to adore, not to protest. That’s the new gloss on the 1st Amendment.”

— William O. Douglas

74. “No matter what the legislature may say, a man has the right to make his speech, print his handbill, compose his newspaper, and deliver his sermon without asking anyone’s permission. The contrary suggestion is abhorrent to our traditions.”

— William O. Douglas

75. “No patent medicine was ever put to wider and more varied use than the Fourteenth Amendment.”

— William O. Douglas

76. “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

77. “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.”

— William O. Douglas

78. “My faith is that the only soul a man must save is his own.”

— William O. Douglas

79. “Christianity has sufficient inner strength to survive and flourish on its own. It does not need state subsidies, nor state privileges, nor state prestige. The more it obtains state support, the greater it curtails human freedom.”

— William O. Douglas

80. “Why cannot we work at cooperative schemes and search for the common ground binding all mankind together?”

— William O. Douglas

81. “Religious experiences which are as real as life to some may be incomprehensible to others.”

— William O. Douglas

82. “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

83. “The interests of the corporation state are to convert all the riches of the earth into dollars.”

— William O. Douglas

84. “It seemed to me that I had barely reached the Court when people were trying to get me off.”

— William O. Douglas

85. “The American government is premised on the theory that if the individual man is to be free, his ideas, his beliefs, his ideology, his philosophy, must be placed beyond the reach of government.”

— William O. Douglas

86. “The purpose of the University of Washington cannot be to produce black lawyers for blacks, Polish lawyers for Poles, Jewish lawyers for Jews, Irish lawyers for Irish. It should be to produce good lawyers for Americans and not to place First Amendment barriers against anyone.”

— William O. Douglas

87. “Motion pictures are of course a different medium of expression than the public speech, the radio, the stage, the novel, or the magazine. But the First Amendment draws no distinction between the various methods of communicating ideas.”

— William O. Douglas

88. “We do not sit as a superlegislature to weigh the wisdom of legislation.”

— William O. Douglas

89. “The Constitution favors no racial group, no political or social group.”

— William O. Douglas

90. “What a man thinks is no concern of the government.”

— William O. Douglas

91. “We who come this way are merely short-term tenants. Our power in wilderness terms is only the power to destroy, not to create. Those who oppose wilderness values today may have sons and daughters who will honor wilderness values tomorrow. Our responsibility as life tenants is to make certain that there are wilderness values to honor after we have gone.”

— William O. Douglas