William J. Brennan Jr. Quotes & Sayings

We are not an assimilative, homogeneous society, but a facilitative, pluralistic one, in which we must be willing to abide someone else's unfamiliar or even repellant practice because the same tolerant impulse protects our own idiosyncrasies.
--Michael H. v. Gerald D., 491 U.S. 110 (1989) — William J. Brennan Jr.

We do not consecrate the flag by punishing its desecration, for in doing so, we dilute the freedom this cherished emblem represents. — William J. Brennan Jr.

Sex and obscenity are not synonymous. Obscene material is material which deals with sex in a manner appealing to prurient interest. — William J. Brennan Jr.

If the right to privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion. — William J. Brennan Jr.

Use of a mentally ill person's involuntary confession is antithetical to the notion of fundamental fairness embodied in the due process clause. — William J. Brennan Jr.

The Framers of the Bill of Rights did not purport to 'create' rights. Rather, they designed the Bill of Rights to prohibit our Government from infringing rights and liberties presumed to be preexisting. — William J. Brennan Jr.

The quest for freedom, dignity, and the rights of man will never end. — William J. Brennan Jr.

The principle inherent in the clause that prohibits pointless infliction of excessive punishment when less severe punishment can adequately achieve the same purposes invalidates the punishment. — William J. Brennan Jr.

We look to the history of the time of framing and to the intervening history of interpretation. But the ultimate question must be, what do the words of the text mean in our time. — William J. Brennan Jr.

Congress acknowledged that society's accumulated myths and fears about disability and disease are as handicapping as are the physical limitations that flow from actual impairment. — William J. Brennan Jr.

Law cannot stand aside from the social changes around it. — William J. Brennan Jr.

Appellant constituted a legitimate class of one, and this provides a basis for Congress's decision to proceed with dispatch with respect to his materials. — William J. Brennan Jr.

We current justices read the Constitution in the only way that we can: as 20th-century Americans. — William J. Brennan Jr.

Sex, a great and mysterious motive force in human life, has indisputably been a subject of absorbing interest to mankind through the ages. — William J. Brennan Jr.

Death is not only an unusually severe punishment, unusual in its pain, in its finality and in its enormity, but is serves no penal purpose more effectively than a less severe punishment. — William J. Brennan Jr.

Religious conflict can be the bloodiest and cruelest conflicts that turn people into fanatics. — William J. Brennan Jr.

No longer is the female destined solely for the home and the rearing of the family and only the male for the marketplace and the world of ideas. — William J. Brennan Jr.