U.S. Supreme Court justice (1906-1997)
The genius of the Constitution rests not in any static meaning it might have had in a world that is dead and gone, but in the adaptability of its great principles to cope with current problems and current needs.
WILLIAM J. BRENNAN
speech to the Text and Teaching Symposium at Georgetown University, October 12, 1985
The Framers of the Constitution knew that free speech is the friend of change and revolution. But they also knew that it is always the deadliest enemy of tyranny.
WILLIAM J. BRENNAN
New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 1964
Death is not only an unusually severe punishment, unusual in its pain, in its finality and in its enormity, but it serves no penal purpose more effectively than a less severe punishment; therefore 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
judicial opinion, July 2, 1976
If the right to privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwanted government intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision to bear or beget a child.
WILLIAM J. BRENNAN
Eisenstadt v. Baird, 1972
It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.
WILLIAM J. BRENNAN
New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 1964
Judges are not final because they are infallible, but they are infallible only because they are final.
WILLIAM J. BRENNAN
United States v. Leon, 1984
The framers discerned fundamental principles.... But our acceptance of the fundamental principles has not and should not bind us to those precise, at times anachronistic, contours. We current justices read the Constitution in the only way that we can: as 20th-century Americans.
WILLIAM J. BRENNAN
speech to the Text and Teaching Symposium at Georgetown University, October 12, 1985
If our free society is to endure, and I know it will, those who govern must recognize that the Framers of the Constitution limited their power in order to preserve human dignity and the air of freedom which is our proudest heritage.
WILLIAM J. BRENNAN
Reason and Passion: Justice Brennan's Enduring Influence
If there is a bedrock principle of the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.
WILLIAM J. BRENNAN
Texas vs. Johnson, 1989
I have long believed that the death penalty is in all circumstances a barbaric and inhuman punishment that violates our Constitution. Even the most vile murderer does not release the state from its constitutional obligation to respect human dignity, for the state does not honor the victim by emulating the murderer who took his life. The fatal infirmity of capital punishment is that it treats members of the human race as non-humans, as objects to be toyed with and discarded.
WILLIAM J. BRENNAN
Reason and Passion: Justice Brennan's Enduring Influence
Our Nation has had a long and unfortunate history of sex discrimination, rationalized by an attitude of 'romantic paternalism' which, in practical effect, put women, not on a pedestal, but in a cage.
WILLIAM J. BRENNAN
Frontiero v. Richardson, 1973
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
Roth v. United States, 1957
The Constitution does not speak of freedom for those who wish to say only what society approves. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of expression without qualification.
WILLIAM J. BRENNAN
Texas vs. Johnson, 1989
To give meaning to the Constitution, it is necessary to give it a flexible interpretation, responsive to changing times. The framers could not have foreseen the problems and issues that face our nation today, and the Constitution should not be interpreted as if they had.
WILLIAM J. BRENNAN
Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, 1969