Great Throughts Treasury

"The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom."

"Common sense often makes good law. "

"The critical point is that the Constitution places the right of silence beyond the reach of government."

"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."

"Absolute discretion is a ruthless master. It is more destructive of freedom than any of man's other inventions."

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

"The privacy and dignity of our citizens [are] being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen -- a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of a [person’s] life."

"These days I see America identified more and more with material things, less and less with spiritual standards. These days I see America acting abroad as an arrogant, selfish, greedy nation interested only in guns and dollars, not in people and their hopes and aspirations. We need a faith that dedicates us to something bigger and more important than ourselves or our possessions. Only if we have that faith will we be able to guide the destiny of nations in this the most critical period of world history."

"The liberties of none are safe unless the liberties of all are protected."

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

"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."

"The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of the people."

"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."

"Fear of ideas makes us impotent and ineffective."

"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."

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

"A people who climb the ridges and sleep under the stars in high mountain meadows, who enter the forest and scale the peaks, who explore glaciers and walk ridges buried deep in snow?these people will give the country some of the indomitable spirit of the mountains."

"Acceptance by government of a dissident press is a measure of the maturity of a nation... The American Government is premised on the theory that if the mind of man is to be free, his ideas, his beliefs, his ideology, his philosophy must be placed beyond the reach of government."

"Any test that turns on what is offensive to the community's standards is too loose, too capricious, too destructive of freedom of expression to be squared with the First Amendment. Under that test, juries can censor, suppress, and punish what they don?t like, provided the matter relates to "sexual impurity" or has a tendency "to excite lustful thoughts". This is community censorship in one of its worst forms. It creates a regime where in the battle between the literati and the Philistines, the Philistines are certain to win."

"Absentee management, no matter how honest and able, cannot equal local management."

"All education is a continuous dialogue of questions and answers that pursue every problem to the horizon. That is the essence of academic freedom."

"All executive power ? from the reign of ancient kings to the rule of modern dictators ? has the outward appearance of efficiency."

"As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness."

"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."

"For there is no constitutional right for any race to be preferred... 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 accordion-like quality."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"He was, however, speaking to a representative of government, the police. And it is to government that one goes 'for a redress of grievances,' to use an almost forgotten phrase of the First Amendment. But it is said that the purpose was 'to cause inconvenience and annoyance.' Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us? The constitutional theory is that we the people are the sovereigns, the state and federal officials only our agents. 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."

"I realized that Eastern thought had somewhat more compassion for all living things. Man was a form of life that in another reincarnation might possibly be a horsefly or a bird of paradise or a deer. So a man of such a faith, looking at animals, might be looking at old friends or ancestors. In the East the wilderness has no evil connotation; it is thought of as an expression of the unity and harmony of the universe."

"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."

"Freedom of movement is the very essence of our free society -- once the right to travel is curtailed, all other rights suffer."

"I?ve often thought that if our zoning boards could be put in charge of botanists, of zoologists and 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."

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

"Inanimate objects are sometimes parties in litigation. A ship has a legal personality, a fiction found useful for maritime purposes. The corporation sole ? a creature of ecclesiastical law ? is an acceptable adversary and large fortunes ride on its cases....So it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life. The river, for example, is the living symbol of all the life it sustains or nourishes ? fish, aquatic insects, water ouzels, otter, fisher, deer, elk, bear, and all other animals, including man, who are dependent on it or who enjoy it for its sight, its sound, or its life. The river as plaintiff speaks for the ecological unit of life that is part of it.""

"In other words, the First Amendment has a penumbra where privacy is protected from government intrusion."

"It is not social change alone which is the challenge. It is the rate of change. That rate of change has been vastly accelerated by numerous factors. Peril lies not in change, but in the tremendous rate of change."

"It is better, so the Fourth Amendment teaches us, that the guilty sometimes go free than the citizens be subject to easy arrest."

"I've often thought that if our zoning boards could be put in charge of botanists, of zoologists and 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."

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

"Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor."

"Man is about to be an automaton; he is identifiable only in the computer. As a person of worth and creativity, as a being with an infinite potential, he retreats and battles the forces that make him inhuman. The dissent we witness is a reaffirmation of faith in man; it is protest against living under rules and prejudices and attitudes that produce the extremes of wealth and poverty and that make us dedicated to the destruction of people through arms, bombs, and gases, and that prepare us to think alike and be submissive objects for the regime of the computer."

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

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

"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."

"May I tell you why it seems to me a good thing for us to remember wrong that has been done to us? That we may forgive it."

"No attack on democracy can hide the fact that it can be replaced only by a system that substitutes coercion for persuasion; one that replaces the individual's choice with the choice of some ruler."

"My faith is that the only soul a man must save is his own."

"Once the government can demand of a publisher the names of the purchasers of his publication, the free press as we know it disappears. Then the spectre of a government agent will look over the shoulder of everyone who reads. ... Fear of criticism goes with every person into the bookstall. The subtle, imponderable pressures of the orthodox lay hold. Some will fear to read what is unpopular, what the powers-that-be dislike. ... fear will take the place of freedom in the libraries, book stores, and homes in the land."

"One aspect of modern life which has gone far to stifle men is the rapid growth of tremendous corporations. Enormous spiritual sacrifices are made in the transformation of shopkeepers into employees. The disappearance of free enterprise has led to a submergence of the individual in the impersonal corporation in much the same manner as he has been submerged in the state in other lands."