Top 60 Louis D. Brandeis Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There is no great writing, only great rewriting.”

— Louis D. Brandeis

2. “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.”

— Louis D. Brandeis

3. “The right most valued by all civilized men is the right to be left alone.”

— Louis D. Brandeis

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

— Louis D. Brandeis

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

— Louis D. Brandeis

6. “In differentiation, not in uniformity, lies the path of progress.”

— Louis D. Brandeis

7. “The only title in our democracy superior to that of President is the title of citizen.”

— Louis D. Brandeis

8. “The US States are our laboratories of democracy.”

— Louis D. Brandeis

9. “The greatest menace to freedom is an inert people.”

— Louis D. Brandeis

10. “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.”

— Louis D. Brandeis

11. “People fear witches, and burn women.”

— Louis D. Brandeis

12. “Behind every argument is someone’s ignorance.”

— Louis D. Brandeis

13. “There is a spark of idealism within every individual which can be fanned into flame and bring forth extraordinary results.”

— Louis D. Brandeis

14. “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

15. “Behind every argument is somebody’s ignorance. Rediscover the foundation of truth and the purpose and causes of dispute immediately disappear.”

— Louis D. Brandeis

16. “There are no shortcuts in evolution.”

— Louis D. Brandeis

17. “In a democracy, the most important office is the office of citizen.”

— Louis D. Brandeis

18. “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

19. “To be good Americans, we must be better Jews, and to be better Jews, we must become Zionists.”

— Louis D. Brandeis

20. “It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.”

— Louis D. Brandeis

21. “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

22. “In business, the earning of profit is something more than an incident of success. It is an essential condition of success. It is an essential condition of success because the continued absence of profit itself spells failure.”

— Louis D. Brandeis

23. “The function of the press is very high. It is almost holy. It ought to serve as a forum for the people, through which the people may know freely what is going on. To misstate or suppress the news is a breach of trust.”

— Louis D. Brandeis

24. “I abhor averages. I like the individual case. A man may have six meals one day and none the next, making an average of three meals per day, but that is not a good way to live.”

— Louis D. Brandeis

25. “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

26. “Strong responsible unions are essential to industrial fair play. Without them the labor bargain is wholly one-sided.”

— Louis D. Brandeis

Featured in: Strong Quotes

27. “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

28. “Neutrality is at times a graver sin than belligerence.”

— Louis D. Brandeis

29. “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

30. “No danger flowing from speech can be deemed clear and present unless the incidence of the evil apprehended is so imminent that it may befall before there is an opportunity for full discussion. Only an emergency can justify repression.”

— Louis D. Brandeis

31. “The most important thing we do is not doing.”

— Louis D. Brandeis

32. “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

33. “I used to oppose women’s suffrage and I’ve come to support it because these women have convinced me that we need full gender equality for full democratic participation.”

— Louis D. Brandeis

34. “There is no such thing as an innocent purchaser of stocks.”

— Louis D. Brandeis

35. “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

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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

39. “The best of wages will not compensate for excessively long working hours which undermine heath.”

— Louis D. Brandeis

40. “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

41. “Repression breeds hate; hate menaces stable government.”

— Louis D. Brandeis

42. “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

43. “No system of regulation can safely be substituted for the operation of individual liberty as expressed in competition.”

— Louis D. Brandeis

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

— Louis D. Brandeis

45. “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.”

— Louis D. Brandeis

46. “Democracy is moral before it is political.”

— Louis D. Brandeis

47. “Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards.”

— Louis D. Brandeis

48. “If you will just start with the idea that this is a hard world, it will all be much simpler.”

— Louis D. Brandeis

49. “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.”

— Louis D. Brandeis

50. “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.”

— Louis D. Brandeis