William O. Douglas
WILLIAM O. DOUGLAS was born in Maine, Minnesota, on October 16, 1898, and raised in Yakima, Washington. He entered Whitman College in 1916, but his studies were interrupted by military service in World War I. Douglas was graduated from Whitman in 1920 and taught school for two years before attending law school at Columbia University. Upon graduation in 1925, he joined a New York law firm, but left two years later to spend one year in Yakima. He subsequently returned to teach law at Columbia University, and transferred to the faculty of Yale University in 1929. In 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Douglas to the Securities and Exchange Commission, and in 1937 he became Chairman. President Roosevelt nominated Douglas to the Supreme Court of the United States on April 15, 1939. The Senate confirmed the appointment on April 17, 1939. Douglas had the longest tenure of any Justice, serving on the Supreme Court for thirty-six years, spanning the careers of five Chief Justices. He retired on November 12, 1975, and died on January 19, 1980, at the age of eighty-one.
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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."[Beauharnais v.Illinois, 342 U.S. 250, 287 (1952) (dissenting)]”
“Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”
“The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom."[Public Utilities Commission v. Pollak, 343 U.S. 451, 467 (1952) (dissenting)]”
“Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order [...] and the like.”
“Only when there is a wilderness can man harmonize his inner being with the wavelengths of the earth. When the earth, its products, its creatures, become his concern, man is caught up in a cause greater than his own life and more meaningful. Only when man loses himself in an endeavor of that magnitude does he walk and live with humanity and reverence.”
“Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us."[The One Un-American Act, Speech to the Author's Guild Council in New York, on receiving the 1951 Lauterbach Award (December 3, 1952)]”