Quotes Database

«Motion pictures are of course a different medium of expression than the public speech, the radio, the stage, the novel, or the magazine. But the First Amendment draws no distinction between the various methods of communicating ideas.»

«Mountains have a decent influence on men. I have never met along the trails of the high mountains a mean man who would cheat and steal. Certainly most men who are raised there or who work there are as wholesome as the mountains themselves. Those who explore them or foot or horseback usually are open, friendly men.»

«I can see you've done a lot of work, but you are off base here. If and when you get appointed to the Supreme Court you can write opinions as you choose.»

«There have always been grievances and youth has always been the agitator.»

«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.»

«The use of violence as an instrument of persuasion is therefore inviting and seems to the discontented to be the only effective protest.»

«Violence has no constitutional sanction; and every government from the beginning has moved against it. But where grievances pile high and most of the elected spokesmen represent the Establishment, violence may be the only effective response.»

«We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being. . . . We find no such Constitutional requirement which makes it necessary for government to be hostile to religion and to throw its weight against efforts to widen the effective scope of religious influence. . . . The First Amendment does not say that in every and all respects there shall be a separation of church and state.»

«The function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when in it invites a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger.»

«The First Amendment commands government to have no interest in theology or ritual; it admonishes the government to be interested in allowing religious freedom to flourish -- whether the result is to produce Catholics, Jews, or Protestants, or to turn the people toward the path of Buddha, or to end in a predominantly Moslem nation, or to produce in the long run atheists or agnostics. On matters of this kind, government must remain neutral. This freedom plainly includes freedom from religion with the right to believe, speak, write, publish and advocate antireligious programs.»