Brandeis Louis Quotes & Sayings

I think he's [Louis Brandeis] a great model for progressive justices today who want to answer the originalists. It's not that the original paradigm cases are irrelevant, but you have to focus on the values the framers were trying to protect, not on the means with which those values were invaded in the 18th century. — Jeffrey Rosen

I came to believe that actually [Louis] Brandeis tended to uphold laws that he liked and strike down those that he didn't, generally strike down centralizing federal agencies in the New Deal, and uphold state economic experimentation. — Jeffrey Rosen

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

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

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

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

I'd say that [Louis] Brandeis practiced a kind of a "living originalism," to use the title of Jack Balkin's great book. He said you start with the paradigm case, which in the case of the Fourth Amendment was these general warrants or writs of assistance, but you define it at a level of abstraction that you can take it into our age and make it our own. — Jeffrey Rosen

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. — Louis D. Brandeis

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

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

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

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

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

I don't think he would have had any trouble answering Justice Sonia Sotomayor's excellent challenge in a case involving GPS surveillance. She said we need an alternative to this whole way of thinking about the privacy now which says that when you give data to a third party, you have no expectations of privacy. And [Louis] Brandeis would have said nonsense, of course you have expectations of privacy because it's intellectual privacy that has to be protected. That's my attempt to channel him on some of those privacy questions. — Jeffrey Rosen

The most important thing we do is not doing. — Louis D. Brandeis

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

During most of my life, my contact with Jews and Judaism was slight. I gave little thought to their problems, save in asking myself, from time to time, whether we were showing by our lives due appreciation of the opportunities which this hospitable country affords. My approach to Zionism was through Americanism. — Louis D. Brandeis

To be good Americans, we must be better Jews, and to be better Jews, we must become Zionists. — Louis D. Brandeis

[Louis] Brandeis is often painted as an acolyte of judicial restraint, or the view that judges should uphold laws whether or not they like them. — Jeffrey Rosen

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

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. — Louis D. Brandeis

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

I'm hardly the first person to say that you've [Jeffrey Rosen] written a book about a person who has more to say about the current state of being than almost anyone, Louis Brandeis, and yet nobody is talking about Louis Brandeis. — Dahlia Lithwick

We shouldn't let the Republicans off the hook. Theodore Roosevelt, we learned from Jeff Cowan's new book, was just as bad as certainly [Louis] Brandeis was, or many Democrats were on the question of segregation. — Jeffrey Rosen

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)] — Louis D. Brandeis

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. — Jo Becker

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

[Louis] Brandeis, like [Tomas] Jefferson, is an equal opportunity critic of bigness. And he, like Jefferson, sees American history as this incredible clash between small producers, farmers, and small business people on the one hand, and wicked oligarchs and financiers and monopolists on the other. — Jeffrey Rosen

It's unfortunate that [Louis] Brandeis was not able to translate or abstract his devotion to cultural pluralism and racial equality as he put it for Jews to enslave people and their descendants and to African Americans. — Jeffrey Rosen

Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. — Louis D. Brandeis

The goose that lays golden eggs has been considered a most valuable possession. But even more profitable is the privilege of taking the golden eggs laid by somebody else's goose. The investment bankers and their associates now enjoy that privilege. — Louis D. Brandeis

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

Sunshine is the greatest disinfectant — Louis D. Brandeis

Louis Brandeis never had the opportunity - or he never sought the opportunity I should say - to work closely with African American lawyers. He was also a Southern Democrat, you know, at a time when both parties were supportive of segregation. — Jeffrey Rosen

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

Ownership has been separated from control; and this separation has removed many of the checks which formerly operated to curb the misuse of wealth and power. — Louis D. Brandeis

I think the answer has to do with the fact that [Louis D.] Brandeis was a consistent critic of bigness in business and in government. — Jeffrey Rosen

Why I find Louis Brandeis so exciting and inspiring because he's teaching us - good legal writing is not a matter of taste, it's a matter of connection with fellow citizens and of democratic education. — Jeffrey Rosen

The tax-exempt privilege is a feature always reflected in the market price of [municipal] bonds. The investor pays for it. — Louis D. Brandeis

I think [Louis] Brandeis challenges all of the current justices. As he said, "If we would guide by the light of reason, we must let our minds be bold." You have to take the values that the framers were concerned about and translate them into this new age. — Jeffrey Rosen

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

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

Repression breeds hate; hate menaces stable government. — Louis D. Brandeis

A man is a better citizen of the United States for being also a loyal citizen of his state and of his city; for being loyal to his family and to his profession or trade; for being loyal to his college or his lodge. — Louis D. Brandeis

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

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

Behind every argument is somebody's ignorance. Rediscover the foundation of truth and the purpose and causes of dispute immediately disappear. — Louis D. Brandeis

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

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

Fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government; that the path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies; and that the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones. — Louis D. Brandeis

The US States are our laboratories of democracy. — Louis D. Brandeis

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

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) — Jane Mayer

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

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

Justice Jefferson has a blind spot on race. You know, more than a blind spot. A terrible blemish on his legacy, slavery, for which he's properly excoriated. So, I think [Louis] Brandeis has done this as well. — Jeffrey Rosen

[Louis] Brandeis is writing directly to us. His clear voice comes through a century and he's speaking to us and he's galvanizing us and he's persuading us. And that's why I love to read the prose. — Jeffrey Rosen

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

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

There is no good writing; there is only good rewriting. — Louis D. Brandeis

For [Louis] Brandeis, you know, ethnicity and background are much less important than facts and reason. And he believes that far from wanting to efface our diversity of perspectives, we have to embrace it because that makes us more American, not less. In that sense, he's incredibly modern in an age of cultural pluralism. And it is disappointing for just the reasons you say that not everyone has embraced his pluralistic vision. — Jeffrey Rosen

The tyranny of Harvard and Yale is another thing that transcends this problem of the set point. But what's so striking about [Louis] Brandeis is he had this vision of cultural pluralism that completely gave the lie to the idea that there was any inconsistency between being Jewish or being a woman or being African American and being fully American. — Jeffrey Rosen

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

Louis Brandeis beloved uncle, Lewis Dembitz, was an ardent abolitionist. His mother was an abolitionist in Kentucky at a time when Brandeis remembered hearing the shot from the confederate soldiers after the second battle of Bull Run. Amazing to think that he heard that and I studied with one of his last law clerks in college. And that encapsulates almost all of American history. — Jeffrey Rosen

I was very much influenced by a great book by the scholar Neil Richards called Intellectual Privacy, that [Louis] Brandeis changed his mind on the proper balance between dignity and free speech. — Jeffrey Rosen

Louis Brandeis started off by embracing the Theodore Roosevelt notion that hyphenated Americanism was unpatriotic. You couldn't have dual loyalties. But then he thinks and he reads and he becomes the head of the American Zionist movement after having previously been a secular Jew in this amazing intellectual evolution. — Jeffrey Rosen

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

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

Men feared witches and burned women. — Louis D. Brandeis

It is not wealth, it is not station, it is not social standing and ambition which can make us worthy of the Jewish name, of the Jewish heritage. To be worthy of them, we must live up to and with them. We must regard ourselves their custodians. — Louis D. Brandeis

Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the state was to make men free to develop their faculties. — Louis D. Brandeis

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

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

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

Whenever I felt tempted to, I don't know, watch cat videos or bad Netflix TV instead of writing this [Louis] Brandeis biography, I thought of his stern but kindly visage and buckled down and wrote the damn thing, because there's so much information out there, and these are such anxious times in democracy, such unreasonable times. — Jeffrey Rosen

When those of Jewish blood exhibit moral or intellectual superiority, genius or special talent, we feel pride in them, even if they have abjured the faith like Spinoza, Marx, Disraeli or Heine. Despite the meditations of pundits or the decrees of council, our own instincts and acts, and those of others, have defined for us the term 'Jew.' — Louis D. Brandeis

[Louis Brandeis] insisted on the necessity of public reason, which he thought could only be achieved if all of us just take the time to inform ourselves about the best arguments on all sides of questions so that we can make up our own minds. — Jeffrey Rosen

However great his outward conformity, the immigrant is not Americanized unless his interests and affections have become deeply rooted here. And we properly demand of the immigrant even more than this. He must be brought into complete harmony with our ideals and aspirations and cooperate with us for their attainment. — Louis D. Brandeis

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

[Louis] Brandeis improves the prose. He simplifies it and perfects the balance of the sentence so it becomes even more memorable and aphoristic. — Jeffrey Rosen

What is Americanization? It manifests itself, in a superficial way, when the immigrant adopts the clothes, the manners and the customs generally prevailing here. Far more important is the manifestation presented when he substitutes for his mother tongue the English language as the common medium of speech. — Louis D. Brandeis

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

Sunshine is the best disinfectant — Louis D. Brandeis

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

The historical resonances are sharp. [Louis] Brandeis is nominated on Jan. 28, 1916. Confirmed on June 1. Waits 125 days between nomination and confirmation, which remains an unbroken record, although Merrick Garland will surpass it in July, if my math is right. Anti-Semitism was definitely not the central reason for the opposition, which tended to focus more on his anti-corporate radicalism, but it was a theme. — Jeffrey Rosen

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

That strain of anti-monopoly crusading egalitarianism really runs throughout American history from [Tomas] Jefferson to Woodrow Wilson, that finds its apotheosis in [Louis] Brandeis, continues through the New Deal, but then it sort of peters out in the '60s because progressives in particular become more interested in extending equality to minorities, and women, and other excluded groups, and little more suspicious of these old white guys, often from the south, who were crusaders against monopolies. — Jeffrey Rosen

Let no American imagine that Zionism is inconsistent with patriotism. Multiple loyalties are objectionable only if they are inconsistent. — Louis D. Brandeis

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

[Louis Brandeis] at the age of 57 decided to become the head of the American Zionist movement was more influential than anyone else in the 20th century in persuading Woodrow Wilson to recognize a Jewish homeland in Palestine. — Jeffrey Rosen

There are better mothers than disaster. A native land is the best of all mothers. We American Jews have a native land we love. But it is even better to have a native land who loves us. — Louis D. Brandeis

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

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

Unlike [Woodrow] Wilson, Louis Brandeis did not support the segregation of the federal government. He was personally courteous to African Americans. He advised them and advised the head of Howard University to create a good law school. And that inspired Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall in their path-breaking work on behalf of desegregation. — Jeffrey Rosen

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

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

[Louis Brandeis] believes in natural rights of speech and liberty and the right to pursue happiness. — Jeffrey Rosen

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

We are not won by arguments that we can analyze, but by tone and temper; by the manner, which is the man himself. — Louis D. Brandeis