William O. Douglas Quotes

85 Sourced Quotes

We know by now that if we make technology the predestined force in our lives, man will walk to the measure of its demands. We know how leveling that influence can be, how easy it is to computerize man and make him a servile thing in a vast industrial complex.... This means we must subject the machine - technology - to control and cease despoiling the earth and filling people with goodies merely to make money.

William O. Douglas
Men need to know the elemental challenges that sea and mountains present. They need to know what it is to be alive and to survive when great storms come. They need to unlock the secrets of streams, lakes, and canyons and to find how these treasures are veritable storehouses of inspiration. They must experience the sense of mastery of adversity. They must find a peak or a ridge that they can reach under their own power alone.

William O. Douglas
We deal with a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights — older than our political parties, older than our school system. Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred. It is an association that 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 our prior decisions.

William O. Douglas
The critical question of "standing" would be simplified and also put neatly in focus if we fashioned a federal rule that allowed environmental issues to be litigated before federal agencies or federal courts in the name of the inanimate object about to be despoiled, defaced, or invaded by roads and bulldozers and where injury is the subject of public outrage. Contemporary public concern for protecting nature's ecological equilibrium should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation. This suit would therefore be more properly labeled as Mineral King v. Morton.

William O. Douglas
I do not know of any salvation for society except through eccentrics, misfits, dissenters, people who protest,

William O. Douglas
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
We need to be bold and adventurous in our thinking in order to survive.

William O. Douglas
Religious experiences which are as real as life to some may be incomprehensible to others.

William O. Douglas
The Constitution favors no racial group, no political or social group.

William O. Douglas
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
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
A function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purposes when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it presses for acceptance of an idea.

William O. Douglas
The rules when the giants play are the same as when the pygmies enter the market.

William O. Douglas
The concept of the public welfare is broad and inclusive... the values it represents are spiritual as well as physical, aesthetic as well as monetary. It is within the power of the legislature to determine that the community should be beautiful as well as healthy, spacious as well as clean, well balanced as well as carefully patroled.

William O. Douglas
Why cannot we work at cooperative schemes and search for the common ground binding all mankind together?

William O. Douglas
The Court's great power is its ability to educate, to provide moral leadership.

William O. Douglas
The whole, though larger than any of its parts, does not necessarily obscure their separate identities.

William O. Douglas
The search…for ways and means to make the machine—and the vast bureaucracy of the corporation state and of government that runs that machine—the servant of man. That is the revolution that is coming.

William O. Douglas
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
One who comes to the Court must come to adore, not to protest. That's the new gloss on the First Amendment, Potter.

William O. Douglas
The critical point is that the Constitution places the right of silence beyond the reach of government.

William O. Douglas
All executive power – from the reign of ancient kings to the rule of modern dictators – has the outward appearance of efficiency.

William O. Douglas
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
That seems to us to be the common sense of the matter; and common sense often makes good law.

William O. Douglas
The struggle is always between the individual and his sacred right to express himself and the power structure that seeks conformity, suppression, and obedience.

William O. Douglas