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.

Louis D. Brandeis

Louis D. Brandeis

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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.

— Louis D. Brandeis

Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.

— Louis D. Brandeis

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

— Louis D. Brandeis

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

— Louis D. Brandeis

Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example.

— Louis D. Brandeis