Quotes about Clear Danger

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

The speech at issue are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature that they present a clear and present danger that they would bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.

In WWI Congress had passed a law that prohibited anyone from undermining or interfering with the war effort. The defendants had passed out anti-war literature to young men heading for military service. The court then overlooked the First Amendment and came up with a strange logic where the “clear and present danger” was the test of whether the First Amendment would apply. The anti war pamphleteers went to jail. Today, we look back on this and find it very surprising but this is yet another example of erosion of freedom and civil liberties when the nation is at war. By the 1950s, the Supreme Court had reversed itself and the First Amendment was restored to its original intent.

Oscar Arias

The existence of nuclear weapons presents a clear and present danger to life on Earth.

Hillary Clinton

I'm deeply concerned. And I think, in many ways, the Trump presidency poses a clear and present danger to our country and to the world.

John Sununu

If you wait until those weapons pose a direct, clear, present danger to the United States, you've probably waited too long.

Peter T. King

WikiLeaks presents a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States.

Damian Lewis

None of us, remember, knew that 9/11 was gonna happen. We didn't live in a state of anxiety and fear about Osama Bin Laden. The CIA might have, and they failed to prevent it. But the general public didn't have any knowledge. Now we have knowledge of it, and it's a very clear and present danger in our lives.

Louis D. Brandeis

No danger flowing from speech can be deemed clear and present unless the incidence of the evil apprehended is so imminent that it may befall before there is an opportunity for full discussion. Only an emergency can justify repression.

Theodore C. Sorensen

We need not renounce the use of conventional force. We will be ready to repel any clear and present danger that poses a genuine threat to our national security and survival.

John McCain

I think we also ought to prepare the American public, by way of informing them, that Saddam Hussein has these weapons, continues to attempt to improve their capability, and would not be reluctant to export them to other countries. So he presents a clear and present danger.

Neil Gaiman

If you have something specific and visible to fear, rather than something that could be anything, it is easier.

Jose Mourinho

As we say in Portugal, they brought the bus and they left the bus in front of the goal.

John F. Kennedy

I do ask every publisher, every editor, and every newsman in the nation to reexamine his own standards, and to recognize the nature of our country's peril. In time of war, the government and the press have customarily joined in an effort based largely on self-discipline, to prevent unauthorized disclosures to the enemy. In time of "clear and present danger," the courts have held that even the privileged rights of the First Amendment must yield to the public's need for national security.

Hugo Black

What finally emerges from the 'clear and present danger' cases is a working principle that the substantive evil must be extremely serious and the degree of imminence extremely high before utterances can be punished...It must be taken as a command of the broadest scope that explicit language, read in the context of a liberty-loving society, will allow.

Clear Danger Quotes