Time & Perspective Quote by William O. Douglas

Douglas opens with a deliberately abrasive comparison: regulating speech like “diseased cattle and impure butter.” It’s a swipe at the bureaucratic impulse to treat expression as a public-health hazard, something to be inspected, stamped, and quarantined before it can circulate. The metaphor isn’t subtle, and that’s the point. He’s collapsing censorship into the mundane machinery of commerce regulation to expose its category error: bad meat is objectively unsafe; “bad” ideas are rarely that simple, and the state’s confidence in its own sorting power is exactly what should worry you.

The second line shifts from government to the crowd. “The audience that hissed yesterday may applaud today, even for the same performance” is Douglas’s argument against freezing a momentary moral panic into law. Public reaction is fickle, reputations reverse, and social consensus ages badly. By emphasizing that the “same performance” can be received in opposite ways, he underscores how much judgment depends on context: who’s speaking, when, and under what political weather. If legality tracks the audience’s mood, then the First Amendment becomes a weather vane.

The subtext is judicial restraint with a spine: courts shouldn’t launder majoritarian discomfort into “reasonable” regulation. Douglas, a hard-edged civil libertarian on the Supreme Court, is warning that the real contagion isn’t offensive speech; it’s the habit of treating dissent as contamination.