Louis Brandeis Quotes

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

We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.

Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.

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 insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding." [Olmstead v. U.S., 277 U.S. 438 (1928) (dissenting)]

We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both. —Louis Brandeis

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." [Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357 (1927)]

If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.

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.

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

There is no great writing, only great rewriting.

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.

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.

The most important political office is that of private citizen.

If we would guide by the light of reason, we must let our minds be bold.

But in both instances, the dissemination of the information diluted its power. As Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis once wrote, "Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.

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

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

In frank expression of conflicting opinion lies the greatest promise of wisdom in governmental action; and in suppression lies ordinarily the greatest peril.

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding. —Justice Louis Brandeis, Olmstead v. United States (1928)

Size, we are told, is not a crime. But size may, at least, become noxious by reason of the means through which it was attained or the uses to which it is put. — Louis Brandeis, Other People’s Money: And How the Bankers Use It, 1913

The power and the growth of power of our financial oligarchs comes from wielding the savings and quick capital of others.

But sporadic evidence indicates how great are the possibilities of accumulation when one has the use of “other people’s money.

When once a banker has entered the Board – whatever may have been the occasion – his grip proves tenacious and his influence usually supreme; for he controls the supply of new money.

In every such case, the individual is entitled to decide that which is his... shall be given to the public.

THERE ARE NO SHORTCUTS IN EVOLUTION

Such affiliations tend as a cover and conduit for secret arrangements and understandings in restriction of competition through the agency of the banking house thus situated.

But as the Pujo Committee finds “the so-called control of life insurance companies by policy-holders through mutualization is a farce” and “its only result is to keep in office a self-constituted, self-perpetuating management.

I live in Alexandria, Virginia. Near the Supreme Court chambers is a toll bridge across the Potomac. When in a rush, I pay the dollar toll and get home early. However, I usually drive outside the downtown section of the city and cross the Potomac on a free bridge. This bridge was placed outside the downtown Washington, DC area to serve a useful social service, getting drivers to drive the extra mile and help alleviate congestion during the rush hour. If I went over the toll bridge and through the barrier without paying the toll, I would be committing tax evasion ... If, however, I drive the extra mile and drive outside the city of Washington to the free bridge, I am using a legitimate, logical and suitable method of tax avoidance, and am performing a useful social service by doing so. For my tax evasion, I should be punished. For my tax avoidance, I should be commended. The tragedy of life today is that so few people know that the free bridge even exists.

Wir können in diesem Land entweder eine Demokratie haben oder wir können großen Wohlstand haben, der in den Händen weniger konzentriert liegt, aber wir können nicht beides haben.

 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.

Every criminal in the public service is a plague spot spreading contagion on every hand.

We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we can’t have both.

Like Jefferson, Brandeis believed that the greatest threat to our constitutional liberties was an uneducated citizenry, and that democracy could not survive both ignorant and free. And

The protection guaranteed by the Amendments is much broader in scope. The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. They recognized the significance of man’s spiritual nature, of his feelings, and of his intellect. They knew that only a part of the pain, pleasure and satisfactions of life are to be found in material things. They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone—the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men. To protect that right, every unjustifiable intrusion by the Government upon the privacy of the individual, whatever the means employed, must be deemed a violation of the Fourth Amendment. And the use, as evidence in a criminal proceeding, of facts ascertained by such intrusion must be deemed a violation of the Fifth. [Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (1928) (dissenting)]

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficial. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greater dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding." —Justice Louis Brandeis, Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 479 (1928)

They became the directing power in the life insurance companies, and other corporate reservoirs of the people’s savings-the buyers of bonds and stocks. They became the directing power also in banks and trust companies-the depositaries of the quick capital of the country-the life blood of business, with which they and others carried on their operations. Thus four distinct functions, each essential to business, and each exercised, originally, by a distinct set of men, became united in the investment banker. It is to this union of business functions that the existence of the Money Trust is mainly due.[1]

And it is also immaterial that the intrusion was in aid of law enforcement. 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 insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.

The investment banker is naturally on the lookout for good bargains in bonds and stocks. Like other merchants he wants to buy his merchandise cheap. But when he becomes director of a corporation, he occupies a position which prevents the transaction by which he acquires its corporate securities from being properly called a bargain. Can there be real bargaining where the same man is on both sides of a trade?

If democracy becomes plutocracy, those who are not rich are effectively disenfranchised. Justice Louis Brandeis famously argued that the United States could have either democracy or wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but not both. The political equality that is required by democracy is always under threat from economic inequality, and the more extreme the economic inequality, the greater the threat to democracy.

Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the state was to make men free to develop their faculties; and that in its government the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. 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. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that without free speech and assembly discussion would be futile; that with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty; and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government.

The statement of Mr. Justice Holmes of the Supreme Court of the United States, in the Oklahoma Bank case, is significant: “We cannot say that the public interests to which we have adverted, and others, are not sufficient to warrant the State in taking the whole business of banking under its control. On the contrary we are of opinion that it may go on from regulation to prohibition except upon such conditions as it may prescribe.

As the familiar quote usually attributed to Supreme Court justice Louis D. Brandeis goes, “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.

American states, which were once praised by the great jurist Louis Brandeis as “laboratories of democracy,” are in danger of becoming laboratories of authoritarianism as those in power rewrite electoral rules, redraw constituencies, and even rescind voting rights to ensure that they do not lose. And in 2016, for the first time in U.S. history, a man with no experience in public office, little observable commitment to constitutional rights, and clear authoritarian tendencies was elected president.

When Holmes emerged as a consistent judicial defender of economic reform and of free speech, he became a hero to progressives and civil libertarians—to people like Louis Brandeis, Learned Hand, Walter Lippmann, and Herbert Croly. Holmes did not share the politics of these people, but he did not think it was his business as a judge to have a politics, and he did nothing to discourage their admiration. It suited his conception of heroic disinterestedness to serve as their Abbott—privately denouncing the stupidity of the views he strove, often boldly and alone, to defend.

What I have desired to do is to make the people of Boston realize that the most important office, and the one which all of us can and should fill, is that of private citizen. The duties of the office of private citizen cannot under a republican form of government be neglected without serious injury to the public.

The world would be so different today if Mark Zuckerberg had not stuck to his ignorant, self-serving interpretation of the US Supreme Court Justice Louis D Brandeis’s aphorism that the way to counter hate speech is more speech. Brandeis said those words in 1927, long before the time of abundance, the time of Facebook, when a lie can now be delivered a million times over.

And it is also immaterial that the intrusion was in aid of law enforcement. 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 insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding. Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (1928) (Brandeis, J., dissenting), overruled by Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967).

The American idea was summed up in the most widely read pamphlet during the American Revolution, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. In it, Paine explained, “Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.”30 Though animated by a deep distrust of authority, America’s Founding Fathers recognized nonetheless that society required a government. Otherwise, who would protect citizens from foreign threats, or violations of their rights by criminals at home? But they wrestled with a dilemma. A government powerful enough to perform its essential functions would tend toward tyranny. To manage this challenge, they designed, as Richard Neustadt taught us, a government of “separated institutions sharing power.”31 This deliberately produced constant struggle among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches that meant delay, gridlock, and even dysfunction. But it also provided checks and balances against abuse. As Justice Louis Brandeis explained eloquently, their purpose was “not to promote efficiency, but to preclude the exercise of arbitrary authority.”32

When personal gossip attains the dignity of print, and crowds the space available for matters of real interest to the community,” future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis wrote in the Harvard Law Review in 1890, in a piece which formed the basis for what we now know as the “right to privacy,” it “destroys at once robustness of thought and delicacy of feeling. No enthusiasm can flourish, no generous impulse can survive under its blighting influence.” Brandeis’s words reflected some of the darkness of Kierkegaard’s worries from fifty years earlier and foretold some of that sullying paranoia that was still to come fifty years in the future. Thiel had read this article at Stanford. Many law students do. Most regard it as another piece of the puzzle that makes up American constitutional legal theory. But Peter believed it. He venerated privacy, in creating space for weirdos and the politically incorrect to do what they do. Because he believed that’s where progress came from. Imagine for a second that you’re the kind of deranged individual who starts companies. You’ve created cryptocurrencies designed to replace the U.S. monetary system that somehow turned into a business that helps people sell Beanie Babies and laser pointers over the internet and ends up being worth billions of dollars. Where others saw science fiction, you’ve always seen opportunities—for real, legitimate business. You’re the kind of person who is a libertarian before that word had any kind of social respectability. You’re a conservative at Stanford. You’re the person who likes Ayn Rand and thinks she’s something more than an author teenage boys like to read. You were driven to entrepreneurship because it was a safe space from consensus, and from convention. How do you respond to social shaming? You hate it. How do you respond to petulant blogs implying there is something wrong with you for being a gay person who isn’t public about his sexuality? Well, that’s the question now, isn’t it?

In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our Government is the potent, omnipresent teacher. For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. . . . If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself.

By 1908, future justice Louis Brandeis was able present the United States Supreme Court, in Muller v. Oregon, with more than 100 studies on the need to protect women against overwork. The strategy worked, and state regulation of women’s work was declared to be constitutional. Yet notably, just three years earlier another court had rejected similar regulation of an industry in which men bore among the heaviest burdens, namely baking.[337

Zimmern’s definition of the Greek conception of leisure: namely, the time away from business when the citizens could develop their faculties through the art and contemplation that were indispensable for full participation in public affairs. “The Greek word for unemployment is ‘scholê,’ which means ‘leisure’: while for business he has no better word than the negative ‘ascholia,’ which means ‘absence of leisure.’ The hours and weeks of unemployment he regards as the best and most natural part of his life,” Zimmern wrote. “Leisure is the mother of art and contemplation, as necessity is the mother of the technical devices we call ‘inventions.’”71

We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both. —Louis Brandeis

Chapter 8 “The Road” “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

Yet, we worry. American politicians now treat their rivals as enemies, intimidate the free press, and threaten to reject the results of elections. They try to weaken the institutional buffers of our democracy, including the courts, intelligence services, and ethics offices. American states, which were once praised by the great jurist Louis Brandeis as “laboratories of democracy,” are in danger of becoming laboratories of authoritarianism as those in power rewrite electoral rules, redraw constituencies, and even rescind voting rights to ensure that they do not lose. And in 2016, for the first time in U.S. history, a man with no experience in public office, little observable commitment to constitutional rights, and clear authoritarian tendencies was elected president. What does all this mean? Are we living through the decline and fall of one of the world’s oldest and most successful democracies?

For a variety of reasons, the British remained intransigent and did all they could to close the doors to Jewish immigration to Palestine.

Brandeis thought that the British should allow more Jews into Palestine. It was not only their obligation under the Balfour Declaration; it was the only way Jews could be saved from Hitler. When

There was a certain irony in Brandeis’s interest in Jews and Zionism. He was not at all religious. In fact, he was puzzled by people who relied on God and religious institutions. So he did not join the Zionist Movement to push Judaism.

We cannot tolerate inordinate wealth for the few along with unbridled money in politics. As the great jurist and Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis once said, “We may have democracy or we may have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.

Olson’s case, he would later say, amounted to “one big Brandeis brief,” a term that refers to twentieth-century litigator Louis Brandeis, who in 1908 pioneered a style of argument that rejected the conservative notion of the law as a static set of truths etched into stone at the time of the nation’s founding. and instead demanded that it respond to changing realities, taking into account not only the framers’ original intent and precedent but new facts that could be gleaned from sociological and scientific study.

As the great jurist and Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis once said, “We may have democracy or we may have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.

Justice Louis D. Brandeis, the Supreme Court’s newest member, wrote a dissenting opinion in which he argued that the union had pursued peaceful, legal means to a legitimate end; that miners who joined the union had no intention to injure their employer’s business; and finally that the UMWA could not be judged an illegal organization under an antitrust law Congress had aimed at monopoly corporations. In Brandeis’s view, the court’s majority naively assumed that Hitchman’s miners freely chose to sign yellow dog contracts. Like his fellow justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Brandeis believed there could be “no liberty of contract where there was no equality of bargaining position.” Under modern industrial conditions, Holmes had written, it was natural for a worker to believe that he could not secure a fair contract unless he belonged to a union. On this basis, Justice Holmes and one other member of the high court joined in Brandeis’s dissent.

Privacy is the right to be alone-the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized man. - Louis D. Brandeis, U.S. Supreme Court Justice

In a democratic society the existence of large centers of private power is a dangerous to the continuing vitality of a free people.

could become occasionally tyrannical, and that democratic liberty would falter if citizens ceased to be engaged. But he also had faith that a virtuous and engaged citizenry—grounded in small communities—could, through deliberation, achieve a good in common that they could not know alone.

In 1900, George and Clara Morris and their four children, Samuel, Selma, Marcella, and Malvina, left Bucharest, Romania, and boarded a ship for New York City. When they arrived in the United States, they stayed in New York City for a few weeks and then decided to move to Los Angeles, where George wanted to become a director in the movie business. Along the way, in St. Louis, Clara had another baby and died in childbirth. George put the children in an orphanage there before heading on to Los Angeles, where he promised to send for them. The children stayed in the orphanage until the oldest child, Marcella, was able to make enough money to get them all out. She moved them back to New York City, where she became the first Jewish female to hold a seat on the Wall Street stock exchange, where she made millions of dollars that she later gave to Brandeis University. She lived with her sisters in an apartment on Charles Street in Greenwich Village and had a house in Southampton, New York, and somewhere along the way had an affair with J. P. Morgan. Interesting? You bet. But don’t worry about remembering any of this, because it’s 90 percent wrong, which I didn’t find out until years later.

If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.

Louis Brandeis said we can have a democracy, or we can have great wealth in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.

We must make our choice,” wrote Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis. “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.