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"We current justices read the Constitution in the only way that we can: as 20th-century Americans."
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"How far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without?"

"Americans are very friendly and very suspicious, that is what Americans are and that is what always upsets the foreigner, who deals with them, they are so friendly how can they be so suspicious they are so suspicious how can they be so friendly but they just are."

"The whole Indian thing, I always say it's really the American holocaust. It's something we need to look at."

"The oil companies are gouging the American citizenry aggressively, relentlessly, and without any sense of conscience whatsoever."

"It's clear price gouging... The oil companies are gouging the American citizenry aggressively, relentlessly, and without any sense of conscience whatsoever."

"All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value."
Explore more quotes by 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."

"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."

"We current justices read the Constitution in the only way that we can: as 20th-century Americans."

"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."

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

"Use of a mentally ill person's involuntary confession is antithetical to the notion of fundamental fairness embodied in the due process clause."

"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."

"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."

"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."
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