Louis Brandeis

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

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 …

Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression 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.

Believing in the power of reason as applied through public discussion, they eschewed silence coerced by law -- the argument of force in its worst form. Recognizing the occasional tyrannies of governing majorities, they amended the …

the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones

the path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies

hate menaces stable government

it is hazardous to discourage thought, hope and imagination

order cannot be secured merely through fear of punishment for its infraction

public discussion is a political duty

the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people

with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine

without free speech and assembly discussion would be futile

freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth

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.

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.

Those who won our independence

At the foundation of our civil liberty lies the principle which 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.

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.

Constitutional rights should not be frittered away by arguments so technical and unsubstantial.

[N]o law, written or unwritten, can be understood without a full knowledge of the facts out of which it arises, and to which it is to be applied.

What are the American ideals? They are the development of the individual for his own and the common good; the development of the individual through liberty, and the attainment of the common good through democracy and social justice.

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. . . . For only through …

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.