Louis D. Brandeis famous quotes

Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Perseverance #Motivation #Fear

We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Country #Wisdom #Hands

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Freedom #Men #Evil

In the frank expression of conflicting opinions lies the greatest promise of wisdom in governmental action.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Wisdom #Lying #Expression

If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Evil #Silence #Speech

If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Respect #Law #Desire

Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Government #Liberty #Purpose

Strong, responsible unions are essential to industrial fair play. Without them the labor bargain is wholly one-sided. The parties to the labor contract must be nearly equal in strength if justice is to be worked out, and this means that the workers must be organized and that their organizations must be recognized by employers as a condition precedent to industrial peace.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Strong #Party #Mean

It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Country #Political #Risk

Our government... teaches the whole people by its example. If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Change #Men #Law

The most important political office is that of the private citizen.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Office #Voting #House

Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill it teaches the whole people by example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means - to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal - would bring terrible retributions.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Teacher #Mean #Men

Those who won our independence... valued liberty as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Happiness #Courage #Mean

The right most valued by all civilized men is the right to be left alone.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Men #Liberty #Left Alone

The logic of words should yield to the logic of realities.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Reality #Yield #Logic

To declare that in the administration of criminal law the end justifies the means to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure conviction of a private criminal would bring terrible retribution.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Mean #Order #Law

The only title in our democracy superior to that of President is the title of citizen.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Democracy #President #Titles

Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Nature #Being The Best #Sunlight

I abhor averages. I like the individual case. A man may have six meals one day and none the next, making an average of three meals per day, but that is not a good way to live.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Humorous #Food #Good Day

America has believed that in differentiation, not in uniformity, lies the path of progress. It acted on this belief; it has advanced human happiness, and it has prospered.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Happiness #Lying #America

If we would guide by the light of reason we must let our minds be bold.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#School #Light #Mind

Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Light #Publicity #Disease

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Peace #War #Men

If you would only recognize that life is hard, things would be so much easier for you.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Motivation #Life Is Hard #Would Be

It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Men #Freedom Of Speech #Irrational Fear

There is no great writing, only great rewriting.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Writing #Rewriting #Great Writing

The old idea of a good bargain was a transaction in which one man got the better of another. The new idea of a good contract is a transaction which is good for both parties to it.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Party #Men #Ideas

There are no shortcuts in evolution.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Shortcuts #Evolution

The world presents enough problems if you believe it to be a world of law and order; do not add to them by believing it to be a world of miracles.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Prayer #Believe #Law

The greatest menace to freedom is an inert people.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Hero #People #Menace

We shall have lost something vital and beyond price on the day when the state denies us the right to resort to force...
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Time #Deny #Lost

In differentiation, not in uniformity, lies the path of progress.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Lying #Progress #Differentiation

Anyone who critically analyzes a business learns this: that the success or failure of an enterprise depends usually upon one man.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Men #Enterprise #Success Or Failure

The Jews are a Distinct Nationality regardless of where they live, their station in life or their shades of belief, and his clarion call to all the Jews in the world to 'organize, organize, organize,' until every Jew in America must stand up and be counted - counted with us - or prove himself, wittingly or unwittingly, of the few who are against their own people.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#America #People #World

In a democracy, the most important office is the office of citizen
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Office #Democracy #Important

Subtler and more far-reaching means of invading privacy have become available to the government. Discovery and invention have made it possible for the government, by means far more effective than stretching upon the rack, to obtain disclosure in court of what is whispered in the closet.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Money #Mean #Government

At the foundation of our civil liberties lies the principle that denies to government officials an exceptional position before the law and which subjects them to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Lying #Government #Law

Ways may someday be developed by which the government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court, and by which it will be enabled to expose to a jury the most intimate occurrences of the home.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Home #Government #Secret

No one can really pull you up very high - you lose your grip on the rope. But on your own two feet you can climb mountains.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Two #Feet #Mountain

The most important office... that of private citizen.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Office #Important #Citizens

There is no such thing as an innocent purchaser of stocks.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Finance #Innocent

It is one of the greatest economic errors to put any limitation upon production.We have not the power to produce more than there is a potential to consume.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Errors #Economic #Produce

The general rule of law is, that the noblest of human productions knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions and ideas become, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to common use.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Communication #Air #Law

Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases,
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Disease #Publicity #Social

The greatest factors making for communism, socialism or anarchy among a free people are the excesses of capital. The talk of the agitator does not advance socialism one step. The great captains of industry and finance... are the chief makers of socialism.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#People #Doe #Excess

We gain nothing by trading the tyranny of capital for the tyranny of labor.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Politics #Gains #Economy

I think all of our human Experience shows that no one with absolute power can be trusted to give it up even in part
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Thinking #Giving #Human Experience

The best of wages will not compensate for excessively long working hours which undermine heath.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Long #Wages #Hours

Sunshine is the best disinfectant
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Sunshine

We learned long ago that liberty could be preserved only by limiting in some way the freedom of action of individuals; that otherwise liberty would necessarily yield to absolutism; and in the same way we have learned that unless there be regulation of competition, its excesses will lead to the destruction of competition, and monopoly will take its place.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Yield #Long #Competition

The makers of our Constitution . . . conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone - the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Men #Rights #Liberty

Democracy is moral before it is political.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Political #Democracy #Moral

Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the state was to make men free to develop their faculties . . . They valued liberty both as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty . . . that public discussion is a political duty; and that this should be the fundamental principle of the American government.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Mean #Men #Political

Crime is contagious....if the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#War #Government #Law

People fear witches, and burn women.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#People #Liberty #Witch

The constitutional right of free speech has been declared to be the same in peace and war. In peace, too, men may differ widely as to what loyalty to our country demands, and an intolerant majority, swayed by passion or by fear, may be prone in the future, as it has been in the past, to stamp as disloyal opinions with which it disagrees.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Loyalty #Country #Freedom

Men long for an afterlife in which there apparently is nothing to do but delight in heaven's wonders.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Men #Afterlife #Long

Organisation can never be a substitute for initiative and for judgement.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Judgement #Initiative #Substitutes

Neutrality is at times a graver sin than belligerence.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Neutrality #Sin #Belligerence

I rise early because no day is long enough for a day's work.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Long #Enough

In business, the earning of profit is something more than an incident of success. It is an essential condition of success. It is an essential condition of success because the continued absence of profit itself spells failure.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Business #Essentials #Earning

Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards. They did not fear political change. They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Character #Order #Political

If you would venture, let your mind be bold . . . not reckless but bold.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Mind #Venture #Reckless

Behind every argument is someone's ignorance.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Ignorance #Argument #Behinds

There is a spark of idealism within every individual which can be fanned into flame and bring forth extraordinary results.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Flames #Sparks #Individual

Strong responsible unions are essential to industrial fair play. Without them the labor bargain is wholly one-sided.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Strong #Play #Essentials

No system of regulation can safely be substituted for the operation of individual liberty as expressed in competition.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Competition #Liberty #Regulation

Nearly all legislation involves a weighing of public needs as against private desires; and likewise a weighing of relative social values.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Desire #Needs #Social

If you will just start with the idea that this is a hard world, it will all be much simpler.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Life #Ideas #World

Fear of serious injury alone cannot justify oppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

#Fear #Men #Religion