128 Quotes by Louis D. Brandeis

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)]

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

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

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

Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.

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

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.

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.

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.