William O. Douglas Quotes About Constitution
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The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of people.
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The Constitution favors no racial group - no political or social group.
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What we must remember, however, is that preservation of liberties does not depend on motives. A suppression of liberty has the same effect whether the suppressor be a reformer or an outlaw. The only protection against misguided zeal is constant alertness to infractions of the guarantees of liberty contained in our Constitution. Each surrender of liberty to the demands of the moment makes easier another, larger surrender. . .
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The Framers [of the Constitution] . . . created the federally protected right of silence and decreed that the law could not be used to pry open one's lips and make him a witness against himself.
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The Constitution and the Bill of Rights we designed to get the government off the backs of the people -- all the people. Those great documents guarantee to us all the rights to personal and spiritual self-fulfillment. But that guarantee is not self-executing. 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 a twilight that we all must be most aware of the change in the air -- however slight -- lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.
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The critical point is that the Constitution places the right of silence beyond the reach of government.
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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.
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We recognize the force of the argument that the effects of war under modern conditions may be felt in the economy for years and years, and that if the war power can be used in days of peace to treat all the wounds which war inflicts on our society, it may not only swallow up all other powers of Congress but largely obliterate the Ninth and the Tenth Amendments as well.
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The function of the prosecutor under the federal Constitution is not to tack as many skins of victims as possible against the wall. His function is to vindicate the rights of the people as expressed in the laws and give those accused of crime a fair trial.
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The court is really the keeper of the conscience, and the conscience is the Constitution.
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The conscience of this nation is the Constitution.
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William O. Douglas
- Born: October 16, 1898
- Died: January 19, 1980
- Occupation: Former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
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