Douglas on freedom

Douglas discussing freedom, from 1957 interview.

“The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom.”
The Right of the People (1958)

“As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air – however slight – lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.”
—September 10, 1976 letter to the Washington State Bar Association

“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,” Nieman Reports (1953)

“The dissent we witness is a reaffirmation of faith in man; it is protest against living under rules and prejudices and attitudes that produce the extremes of wealth and poverty and that make us dedicated to the destruction of people through arms, bombs, and gases, and that prepare us to think alike and be submissive objects for the regime of the computer.”
Points of  Rebellion (1969)

Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas standing next to his horse in the wilderness in Aspen, Colorado in 1960.
Aspen, Colorado, 1960

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