Is there an easier way to open the character palette and keyboard viewer on OS X?

I don’t want to have the input menu always in my menu bar because it takes up valuable space on my small laptop screen (I’ve got too many menu bar items as it is!). So, at the moment, if I want to find how to type a special character or just to insert one manually, I’ve got to go to system prefs, enable the input menu menu bar item and go from there.

Is there any way to open them without first having to enable the input menu?