Quotes from William J. Brennan (Jr.)

All ideas having even the slightest redeeming social importance—unorthodox ideas, controversial ideas, even ideas hateful to the prevailing climate of opinion—have the full protection of the guaranties…. But implicit in the history of the First Amendment is the rejection of obscenity as utterly without redeeming social importance.

Debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide open, and that… may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.

The chilling effect upon the exercise of First Amendment rights may derive from the fact of the prosecution, unaffected by prospects of its success or failure.

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.

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.

If the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.

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.

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.

We current Justices read the Constitution in the only way that we can: as Twentieth Century Americans…. For 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.