William O. Douglas People Quotations

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

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

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.

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

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.

The people, the ultimate governors, must have absolute freedom of, and therefore privacy of, their individual opinions and beliefs regardless of how suspect or strange they may appear to others. Ancillary to that principle is the conclusion that an individual must also have absolute privacy over whatever information he may generate in the course of testing his opinions and beliefs.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.