William O. Douglas Quotes

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.

People have to be able to make money off their brains and their hearts. Or else we're all going to starve, and it's the machines that'll get good.

When we live in a world that is very unjust, you have to be a dissident.

The minute you succumb to outside pressure, you cease to be creative.

Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes?

To curb the machine and limit art to handicraft is a denial of opportunity.

We need more people speaking out. This country is not overrun with rebels and free thinkers. It's overrun with sheep and conformists.

If everybody is happy, then something is wrong with the democratic process.

In the society, where people are just parts in a larger machine, individuals are unable to develop fully.

The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.

If you try to smooth out society with a hot iron, you're liable to drive out all talent.

It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.

Dissent is the mark of freedom.

We think that a powerful and vigorous movement is impossible without differences — "true conformity" is possible only in the cemetery.

When people are standing up for our present rotten system, they are being worse than Communists, it seems to me.

I'm used to being told what to say, but not what to think... that's usually left up to me.

The American woman's inequality with men is proved by her defiant attitude.

There are forces working in the world as never before in the history of mankind for standardization, for the regimentation of us all, or what I like to call making muffins of us, muffins all like every other muffin in the muffin tin. This is the limited universe, the drying dissipating universe that we can help our children to avoid by providing them with ‘explosive material capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly'.

Dissent is the mark of freedom, as originality is the mark of independence of mind. … No one can be a scientist … if he does not have independence of observation and of thought.

An opinion, though it is original, does not necessarily differ from the accepted opinion; the important thing is that it does not try to conform to it.

Again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. ("The Plague")

In some ways, it is easier to be a dissident, for then one is without responsibility.

If the human being is condemned and restricted to perform the same functions over and over again, he will not even be a good ant, not to mention a good human being.

The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.