Louis D. Brandeis Quotes Page 2

“There are no shortcuts to evolution.”

“There must be opportunities for judgment to mature. When, therefore, you increase your business to a very great extent, and the multitude of problems increase with its growth, you will find, in the first place, that the man at the head has a diminishing knowledge of the facts and, in the second place, a diminishing opportunity of exercising a careful judgment upon them.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“When a man feels that he cannot leave his work, it is a sure sign of an impending collapse.”

“No people ever did or ever can attain a worthy civilization by the satisfaction merely of material needs.”

“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 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?”

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

“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.”

“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 the ennobling effect of its strivings can we develop the best that is in us and give to this country the full benefit of our great inheritance.”

“It is, as a rule, far more important how men pursue their occupation than what the occupation is which they select.”

“The intensity and complexity of life, attendant upon advancing civilization, have rendered necessary some retreat from the world.”

“There is in most Americans some spark of idealism, which can be fanned into a flame. It takes sometimes a divining rod to find what it is; but when found, and that means often, when disclosed to the owners, the results are often extraordinary.”

“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.”