William O. Douglas Quotes on Law
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The law is not a series of calculating machines where answers come tumbling out when the right levers are pushed.
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We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.
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The Fifth Amendment is an old friend and a good friend. one of the great landmarks in men's struggle to be free of tyranny, to be decent and civilized.
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The right to dissent is the only thing that makes life tolerable for a judge of an appellate court... the affairs of government could not be conducted by democratic standards without it.
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The Constitution favors no racial group, no political or social group.
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The first opinion the Court ever filed has a dissenting opinion. Dissent is a tradition of this Court... When someone is writing for the Court, he hopes to get eight others to agree with him, so many of the majority opinions are rather stultified.
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The Court's great power is its ability to educate, to provide moral leadership.
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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.
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Common sense often makes good law.
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No patent medicine was ever put to wider and more varied use than the Fourteenth Amendment.
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Tell the FBI that the kidnappers should pick out a judge that Nixon wants back.
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We do not sit as a superlegislature to weigh the wisdom of legislation.
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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.
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At the constitutional level where we work, ninety percent of any decision is emotional. The rational part of us supplies the reasons for supporting our predilections.