Quotations

from the book

Points of Rebellion

by William O. Douglas

U.S. Supreme Court Justice

p4
Although television and radio time as well as newspaper space is available to the affluent members of this society to disseminate their views, most people cannot afford that space. Hence, the means of protest, and the customary manner of dissent in America, from the days of the American Revolution, has been pamphleteering.

p5
The police are an arm of the Establishment and view protesters with suspicion. Yet American protesters need not be submissive. A speaker who resists arrest is acting as a free man. The police do not have carte blanche to interfere with his freedom. They do not have the license to arrest at will or to silence people at will.

p7
Military strategy has ... become dominant in our thinking; and the dominance of the military attitude has had a sad effect at home.

p10
The interests of the corporation state are to convert all the riches of the earth into dollars.

p12
The great rewards are in the Establishment and in work for the Establishment. While the Establishment welcomes inventive genius at the scientific level ... it does not welcome dissent on the great racial, ideological, and social issues that face our people:

p15
The case against the university is that it is chiefly a handmaiden of the state or of industry or, worse yet, of the military-industrial complex.

p29
Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order, to efficiency of operations, to scientific advancement, and the like. The cause of privacy will be won or lost essentially in legislative halls and in constitutional assemblies. If it is won, this pluralistic society of ours will experience a spiritual renewal. If it is lost we will have written our own prescription for mediocrity and conformity.

The tendency of these mounting invasions of privacy is the creation of a creeping conformity that makes us timid in our thinking at a time when the problems which envelop us demand bold and adventuresome attitudes.

p31
The tense and perilous times in which we live demand an invigorating dialogue. Yet we seem largely incapable of conducting one because of the growing rightist tendencies in the nation that demand conformity as technical and financial help-to rebuilding a new world order controlled by Law rather than by Force.

p32
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...

p41
The Pentagon has a fantastic budget that enables it to dream of putting down the much-needed revolutions which will arise in Peru, in the Philippines, and in other benighted countries.

p53
An American GI in Vietnam wrote me in early 1969, stating that bald truth:
"Somewhere I in our history-though not intentionally-we slowly moved from a government of the people to a government of a chosen few . . . who, either by birth, family tradition or social standing-a minority possessing all the wealth and power- now . . . control the destiny of mankind."

This GI ended by saying, "You see, Mr. Douglas, the greatest cause of alienation is that my generation has no one to turn to." And he added, "With all the hatred and violence that exist throughout the world it is time someone, regardless of personal risk, must stand up and represent the feelings, the hopes, the dreams, the visions and desires of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who died, are dying, and will die in the search of truth."

p55
As the President of Amherst, Dr. Calvin H. Plimpton, wrote President Nixon on May 2, 1969:

"The pervasive and insistent disquiet on many campuses throughout the nation indicates that unrest results, not from a conspiracy by a few, but from a shared sense that the nation has no adequate plans for meeting the crises of our society.... We do not say that all of the problems faced by colleges and universities are a reflection of the malaise of the larger society. That is not true. But we do say that until political leadership addresses itself to the major problems of our society-the huge expenditure of national resources for military purposes ... the critical needs of America's ... poor, the unequal division of our life on racial issues - until this happens, the concern and energy of those who know the need for change will seek outlets for their frustration."

p56
The truth is that a vast restructuring of our society is needed if remedies are to become available to the average person. Without that restructuring the good will that holds society together will be slowly dissipated.

p57
We are witnessing, I think, a new American phenomenon. The two parties have become almost indistinguishable; and each is controlled by the Establishment. The modern day dissenters and protesters are functioning as the loyal opposition functions in England. They are the

p58
Adolf Hitler, who said in 1932:

The streets of our country are in turmoil. The universities are filled with students rebelling and rioting. Communists are seeking to destroy our country. Russia is threatening us with her might and the republic is in danger. Yes, danger from within and without. We need law and order.

p65
General David M. Shoup of the Marines
War has become to American civilians "an exciting adventure, a competitive game, and an escape from the dull routine of peacetime."

p68
Those in power are blind devotees to private enterprise. They accept that degree of socialism implicit in the vast subsidies to the military-industrial-complex, but not that type of socialism which maintains public projects for the disemployed and the unemployed alike.

p68
Our upside down welfare state is "socialism for the rich, free enterprise for the poor." The great welfare scandal of the age concerns the dole we give rich people... Any tax deduction is in reality a "tax expenditure," for it means that on the average the Treasury pays 52 per cent of the deduction. When we get deeply into the subject we learn that the cost of public housing for the poorest twenty per cent of the people is picayune compared to federal subsidy of the housing costs of the wealthiest twenty per cent. Thus, for 1962, Alvin Schoor in Explorations in Social Policy, computed that, while we spent 870 million dollars on housing for the poor, the tax deductions for the top twenty per cent amounted to 1.7 billion dollars.

p92
The risk of violence is a continuing one in our own society, because the oncoming generation has two deep-seated convictions:

First: The welfare program works in reverse by siphoning off billions of dollars to the rich and leaving millions of people hungry and other millions feeling the sting of discrimination.

Second: The special interests that control government use its powers to favor themselves and to perpetuate regimes of oppression, exploitation, and discrimination against the many.

There are only two choices: A police state in which all dissent is suppressed or rigidly controlled; or a society where law is responsive to human needs.

p96
The search of the young today is more specific than the ancient search for the Holy Grail. The search of the youth today is for ways and means to make the machine-and the vast bureaucracy of the corporation state and of government that runs that machine-the servant of man.

That is the revolution that is coming.

... It could be a revolution in the nature of an explosive political regeneration. It depends on how wise the Establishment is. If, with its stockpile of arms, it resolves to suppress the dissenters, America will face, I fear, an awful ordeal.

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