William O. Douglas Quotes

I think we've made tremendous progress on racism. We've even made progress on war. We've made almost no progress on poverty.

Your not going to change the hearts and minds. You have to change to law.

Laws and customs may be creative of vice; and should be therefore perpetually under process of observation and correction.

Laws never would be improved, if there were not numerous persons whose moral sentiments are better than the existing laws.

We must liberate our concepts of justice, our laws and legal institutions from the bonds which hold a tight grip on us although they are incompatible with the needs of our century.

Those who are most desperate for change are those who are the most powerless to effect it.

American journalists tend to treat inequality as a fact of life. But it needn't be.

Women make natural anarchists and revolutionaries because they've always been second-class citizens, kinda having had to claw their way up. I mean, who made up all the rules in the culture? Men - white male corporate society. So why wouldn't a woman want to rebel against that?

In a world of increasing inequality, the legitimacy of institutions that give precedence to the property rights of 'the Haves' over the human rights of 'the Have Nots' is inevitably called into serious question.

If society will not admit of woman's free development, then society must be remodeled.

No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.

Almost certainly, however, the first essential component of social justice is adequate food for all mankind.

The extension of women's rights is the basic principle of all social progress.

We have to improve life, not just for those who have the most skills and those who know how to manipulate the system. But also for and with those who often have so much to give but never get the opportunity.

Any of the social changes in American history are because people thought there was injustice. We have to show that this corporate welfare and cronyism is unjust - and that it's not only rigging the system so people get wealthy who don't deserve to get wealthy.

I don't care about wealth. What seems to be upsetting is institutionalizing the advantages that wealth gives you.

If you want good laws, burn those you have and make new ones.

As you would expect when individualism is based only on opportunity, no one asks what happens to those who have neither the financial nor the political clout to exercise their tiny portion of that opportunity.

Adults must awaken to the urgency of the young people’s unrest—in other words, there must be created an adult unrest against the inequities and injustices in the present system.

You can't find your way to social reform through the forces that made social reform necessary.

America’s real majority is suffering a minority complex of neglect. They have become the real foes of Negro rights, foreign aid, etc, because … they feel forgotten, at the second table behind the tightly organized smaller groups at either end of the U. S. spectrum.

Radicalism is a label that is always applied to people who are endeavoring to get freedom.

We will not settle for a state that will settle for an underclass.

We … need education in the obvious – to learn to transcend our own convictions and to leave room for much that we hold dear to be done away with short of revolution by the orderly change of law.

This is an fascist society. We have to change its authoritarian structure …. And in the process we have to let a lot of people get away with crimes.